
Class JdX-Xi±4 

Book ii 

Copyright^? 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 






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The Scholar's 
Larger Life 

By 

James L. Hill, D. D. 



Author of 
The Worst Boys in Town, Revisiting the Earth, 

Favorites of History, The Immortal Seven, 

The Oentury's Capstone, Boys in the Late War, 

A Crowning Achievement. 




1920 

The Stratford Company, Publishers 

Boston, Massachusetts 



nf 



Copyright 1921 

The STRATFORD CO., Publishers 

Boston, Mass. 



JAN {41921 



The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 



©CIA608019 



'Go, little book, Qod send thee good passage. " 



Contents 

I. The Scholar's Larger Life 1 

II. A Jubilee Address 24 

III. Love of Country 40 

IV. The Noble Art of Hurrahing .... 47 
V. Being At One's Best 55 

VI. The New Forum and The Old Lyceum . 66 

VII. Not Negro Churches, but Churches . . 79 

VIII. Tying the Silken Knot 86 

IX. The Superlative Vacation 93 

X. The Prince of Preachers 108 

XI. The Great Awakening .118 

XII. The Greatest Revival 127 

XIII. What Made the Greatest Revival 

In Human History 134 

XIV. Some Elements of Mr. Moody's Power . 141 
XV. Memory Comforting Sorrow .... 145 

XVI. Earthly Melodies and the New Song . 150 

XVII. The Gift of the Bottom Dollar ... 154 

XVIII. The Growth of Government .... 166 

Appendix 197 



Introduction 

The warm recognition and the public favor given 
to the several parts of this volume abundantly justify 
the editor in making this compilation. Happily the 
to-be-or-not-to-be of this publication does not rest upon 
the opinion of any one individual. When a procedure 
that touches the people is proposed, it is the custom to 
grant a "hearing." To the reader some credible wit- 
nesses are introduced. What are these among so many ? 
We bind up the avilable evidence in a sheaf as we 
cannot use a tithe of it. The bulk of it might be mis- 
taken for a portion of the book. The scriptural num- 
ber of completeness is seven. To that requirement ac- 
cordingly, in an appendix to this volume, an attempt 
is made to limit the testimonials. As Shakespeare says, 

' ' See what they be. 
Read them. ' ' 

Mrs. James L. Hill. 
225 Lafayette St., 
Salem, Mass. 



I 

THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

When the sisters of Mendelssohn asked him, in 
Berlin, to recount to them some of his experiences in 
the Hebrides he seated himself at the piano, saying 
as he began to play, "And this is what I saw." A 
year later, under the sunny skies of Italy this theme 
grew into the magnificent "Overture to the Caves of 
Fingal" but the passion of it possessed him from the 
day he visited the basaltic caverns of the western 
isles of Scotland. What men first want is a new 
interest and when that is given it may voice itself 
in deeds or in "Songs Without Words." There is a 
difference in flavor between two books when, on the 
one hand a man has something he feels he must say 
and on the other hand for the sake of being an 
author he wants to say something. All high edu- 
cation, my young friends, must be self moved. Let 
us have a good appetite before we take nourishment. 
Once create a thirst for knowledge and it will find 
its own satisfaction. An awakening here is the dawn 
of culture. "Murder will out," exclaims the proverb, 
but this is no pecularity of murder. Education will 
out or one's lack of it. A classical enthusiasm will 
out and so will what I shall call "The Spontaneous 
Element in Education." 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

Young friends, there is a practical world all 
about us, that without pause or rest is crying out, 
Do something! Do something! Oh, do something! 
But brothers and sisters mine, we must first be some- 
thing before we can do something. All the strain 
today comes on the personality. It used to make but 
little difference by whom a thing was said if it was 
only the truth. Time was when God could use the 
saddle animal which Balaam rode in rebuking the 
madness of a prophet and he used a serpent even, at 
the first in Eden. But it is different now. As a man 
is, so is his strength. When a bank check is laid 
upon the counter the thought instinctively rises, 
"Let me be careful to see who is behind it." And 
when a man expresses an opinion today the world's 
attitude is, "Let's see, who are you?" On going 
into a building which Raffaelle was adorning with 
frescoes, Michael Angelo observed that the figures 
were much too small to be in keeping with the size 
of the room. The elder artist took a crayon and 
sketched on the wall a colossal head in proportion 
to the vast spaces to be filled, and wrote beneath it 
the simple word "Amplius." That one word contains 
the burden of my message today — "Amplius," I 
have phrased it, "Larger." 

The Scholar's Larger Life 
It must be evident to all of you who are ob- 
servers of the present shaping of events that the 
graduates who are now coming upon the field of 
action are destined to live in stirring times. During 

[2] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

your day will probably be wrought out a more gen- 
eral and vital change in the condition of society than 
has been effected in any one epoch since the 
beginning of the Christian Era. A work of prepara- 
tion has been going on for the past few years in 
sociology and economics, in practical art, in the 
discovery of Roentgen Photography, in commerce 
and travel; in the circulation of intelligence in 
political principles; in criticism and the general 
advancement of average people, the results of which 
remain to be elaborated. New questions of home 
policy are coming to the front above currency, civil 
service reform or even the tariff. The rays may 
converge to a focus during the active life of those 
whom today I specially address. It is a great thing 
to live at such a period as this. It is in some respects 
a great privilege. Anyway, it carries a vast respon- 
sibility. Blessed are the graduates of today. Since 
coming on this campus I have wished myself among 
you. Blessed are ye, that shall still be young when 
the new epoch, about to open, is ushered in. Most 
of you will tarry for its dawning in the professional 
schools. With it you will begin your public and 
active life. Blessed among men and women are ye 
whose lives are all before you. 

For your career everything yet done seems 
only preparative. May I point this out to you in 
some five particulars? 

I. More has been done in touching other 
nations through foreign missions during the lifetime 

[3] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

of persons still living than in all the united history 
of the planet before. 

II. During the lifetime of the members of this 
graduating class, I mean in twenty years, more 
copies of the Sacred Scriptures have been printed 
and distributed than in all the centuries combined 
since the morning stars sang together and the Sons 
of God shouted for joy. 

III. During the fast fleeting years, since the 
revival of 1857, which was laic in its genesis and 
conduct, through commissions and a vast number of 
associations and societies more has been done to 
bring laymen into power and recognition than in 
all our Christian annals together. 

IV. More has been done by philanthropists, 
salvation armies and students of social conditions 
for the good of men at the bottom of society, for the 
submerged tenth, for those defeated in the battle 
of life, than in all the added years since Apostolic 
voice rang out in the hearing of the brotherhood of 
man, "Seek ye one another's good." 

V. More has been done to introduce young 
people into Christian work than in all the time 
together since God rested from His creative labor 
and called its product good. 

In the ruins of Baalbec, thirty-six miles north 
of Damascus, there was once a temple in the process 
of construction that must have been the wonder of 
the earth. Not remote is a quarry and there may 
be seen nearly detached the largest pillar in the 

[4] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

world of but a single stone. Here, on the one hand, 
in the temple is a niche still waiting for it; there, 
on the other hand, in the quarry is the pillar large 
and beautifully proportioned. It has been lying 
there for forty centuries and is a symbol of all who 
fail to reach the intended place marked for them 
by divine appointment. Here in this class is the 
graduate and somewhere is the niche. Your useful- 
ness and plan are only perfected when you come to 
stand in your place as designed by heaven. 

Most of you, in days of recuperation and 
privilege will, at some time or another, undoubtedly 
stand in the senate chamber of the ducal palace of 
that ancient republic of Venice and there, in that 
amazing presence, will gaze upon the seventy-six 
Doges there portrayed. Each picture has a compli- 
mentary inscription attached, until you come in the 
brilliant succession to a space that is black and 
blank. Here are the words: "Hie Locus Marini 
Falerio." Here is the place that should have been 
filled by Marini Falerio. It seems cruel to keep 
that pitiless inscription posted there, since the 
unhappy man has been in his grave five hundred 
years, who, by his own criminal shortcoming, ob- 
structed his elevation to the place that the God of 
history intended him to fill. The most disappointing 
alumnus that a college like this can carry is a blank 
young man. Resolve for Alma Mater's sake as well 
as for your own that you will not be a cipher, but 
a significant figure. In Washington they exhibit, in 

[5] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

the treasury department, a bank note of large 
denomination that has been allowed to remain 
unfilled — suggesting what it might be, but isn't. 
Be not thou like unto that. It is the great , good 
fortune of this noble college that good material comes 
here to be moulded. The newer the soil the bet- 
ter the wheat. It is likely to be graded A No. 1 
hard. There is no more perfect democratic com- 
munity on earth, as has been shown, than an Ameri- 
can fresh water college. Every one is rated for 
what he is and treated accordingly. No accident 
of wealth, position or family environment counts for 
much beyond what his personal worth warrants. 
Woe to the man who appears to stand upon an arti- 
ficial basis or who has any unfortunate peculiarities 
or mannerisms. Some irreverent undergraduate is 
sure to blurt out an appellation that contains some 
stinging truth and his victim must carry it as long 
as his connection with the college lasts. If the 
Prince of Wales or some young son of an English 
Duke were to enter an American college, the boys 
would size him up in twenty-four hours and put 
him where he belongs. The college is a small world 
in itself where real worth is recognized irrespective 
of conditions of birth and breeding. Public senti- 
ment is here all powerful, and may you have been 
so schooled that you will not be careless respecting 
it. Where the majority of the students are of the 
earnest determined type and are not cursed with too 
much money, and have come from good homes and 

[6] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

of good stock, their future is assured. I have no 
better wish for you than that you should maintain 
what, for the want of a name, I will call "The Col- 
lege Spirit." It is illustrated in its perfection by 
what in your baseball contests with the faculty you 
call team work. One of you is willing to go down at 
second base if another can, by your sacrifice, get 
home. A man will prostrate himself before an 
approaching football wedge, saying, "Hitherto 
shalt thou come and no further, and here shall thy 
proud steps be stayed;" if the advance of the 
opposing V, or in this presence to be more classical, 
the Alexandrian phalanx can be heaped up. A 
witness described football as the game where they 
carry the ball and kick one another. He said he did 
not know when a ball was kicked properly, but that 
he did know when a man was kicked improperly. 
In athletics the great thing is to pull together. A 
defensive play never won a football game. Men 
are taught they should, watch the ball and play 
closer and support one another. A baseball player 
in the Boston nine was expelled not long ago for 
indifference to the game. He must not have his 
whole desires for personal success regardless of what 
befalls others. When he takes a side he must not 
say "mine," but "ours." Winning ball can be 
played in no other way. A crew must stand for 
co-operation and self-sacrifice. They must stick 
together like brothers and be built like a watch. You 
recall how it is with the Esquimau dogs, every one 

[7] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

is tied by a separate rope to the sledge, and each 
dog goes according to his own inclination. This 
primitive kind of hitch, where one may pull all the 
load, will never be popular as civilization advances. 
Did you ever watch the Yale men in the boats at 
New London? The precision with which they move 
is as if the hands holding the oars were attached to 
some automatic machinery. Such unison does not 
come by chance. 

No one man alone can win. "Let not the soli- 
tary man/' says Goethe, "think that he can 
accomplish anything. ' ' Shakespeare makes Cori- 
olanus say, "Begone ye fragments!" No man can 
be great alone. No one can get rich alone. No man 
can be a Christian alone. "When bad men com- 
bine/ ' said Burke, "good men must associate.' ' The 
saloon is always the saloon. It is always united. It 
has no quarrels. The large dealer stands by the 
small dealer. People may denounce machine politics 
as they please, but organization beats disorganiza- 
tion. Guerilla warfare always succumbs to con- 
certed action and discipline. In the great battle of 
Emperors at Austerlitz, Napoleon won solely because 
he had, by organization, welded his army into a 
thunder-bolt. With outward circumstances wholly 
adverse the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth suc- 
ceeded by making common cause. Thus striving 
they founded a nation. 

They believed in the power of ' ' Together, ' ' and 
if I were to select from the burden of my message 

[8] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

to you today a single sentence which I could wish 
to have etched on the fleshy tablets of your hearts 
(as filled with hope you go forth to make the choices 
which shall determine your contribution to the wel- 
fare of mankind and your permanence in the 
recollection of mankind) it would be this. Young 
men and women, the effect of your life's work, your 
individual success and influence and power will 
depend more on what you identify yourself with 
than upon any other single condition whatsoever. 
What would Paul be without his identification with 
the Christian gospel? What would Columbus be 
without his relations to a new continent? Do you 
not see that by as much as you derogate from his 
peculiar relations as discoverer, you subtract from 
his claim upon remembrance? What is Watt with- 
out his engine? What is Fulton without his steam- 
boat? What is Morse, or Cyrus Field without elec- 
tric telegraph and cable? What is Lincoln except 
for identification with emancipation and a reunited 
nation? If this item does not seem as significant 
to you as it does to me, I can better impress the 
thought if I turn it around. I have a New England 
orator in mind whom, except for the proprieties of 
the occasion I would name, who in the first section 
of his life identified himself with the pioneers to 
Bleeding Kansas. No one was so eloquent a cham- 
pion of our brother in Black. As his closest ally he 
visited often the room of William Lloyd Garrison 
where, 

[9] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

"Unfriended and unseen, 

Toiled o'er his types a poor unlearned young man. 

The place was dark, unfurnitured and mean; 

Yet there the freedom of a race began." 
Now, while our orator was identified with a 
great cause he took dignity and quality and renown 
from it. But emancipaiton being past, he allied 
himself with a large number of relatively unim- 
portant and doubtful issues and seemed to many, 
except by reminiscence, a very ordinary individual, 
without much of a message, lingering belated on the 
stage of life. In himself he was as great in the last 
cause as in the first. His powers were better 
developed, his utterance more affluent, his prestige 
and influence unspeakably enhanced; yet all the 
while he, the possessor of uncommon gifts, was 
becoming smaller. Let me hammer on that nail 
again, young friends, your success and power will be 
determined by what you identify yourself with. 

Just here, all my powers of self-restraint must 
be reinforced by the liveliest sense of what befits 
this august occasion, to dissuade me from becoming 
a special pleader in behalf of a score of great causes 
that reach out their hands to you in perishing need. 
The world's great want today is the leadership of 
educated men. The cause, for example, of the work- 
ingman, he certainly has some kind of a cause, has 
been left to the Sandlots Demagogue, enthusiastic 
to be sure, but ignorant brethren, and narrow. It is 
believed in New England that if a man is not com- 
prehensive enough to grasp any other question, he 

[10] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

becomes an apostle of the gospel of temperance; a 
cause that needs not his ignorance, but a leadership 
that ought to fall only to educated men. Nor has 
the Christian college engaged in making good citi- 
zens as she should. To have now a patriotic revival 
is one of the new responsibilities of educated men. 
The Christian scholar is a citizen of two kingdoms 
and owes duties to both. He may pray right, but 
he often votes wrong, or not at all. The public 
conscience is even now but half awake. Cities still 
exist in which a horde of unscrupulous adventurers 
have taken possession of the political machinery. 
America's starving need is of The Larger Life of the 
Scholar, exhibiting him in politics and in affairs. 

But by reason of these four years of cloistered 
life you are fearfully exposed to several snares. Let 
me enumerate a few of what I will call "The mis- 
takes of educated men." First, is what we know 
in New England as "Harvard Indifference. " It was 
not from their forefathers, as has been eloquently 
shown that the collegians in our foremost seat of 
learning got this poor quality. It never came across 
the sea in the Mayflower with the early settlers. It 
is the opposite of that stubborn strength of character 
and of that burning zeal which sent Endicott and 
Winthrop and Bradford and Brewster to a wilder- 
ness to found a nation of their descendants — the 
embattled farmers to Lexington, Concord, Bunker 
Hill, Yorktown and Appomattox. It is the contempt 
for all that eagerness of heart and life which inspires 

t»] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

the young enthusiast when first "He quits his ease 
for fame and lives laborious days." "I do not love a 
man, ' ' says Goldsmith, ' ' who is zealous for nothing. ' ' 
In the presence of a great issue, "Harvard Indif- 
ference" is no longer ridiculous, it is pitiful. Long 
indulged, it becomes ingrained in the character. It 
is a great maker of bad citizens. It was because 
students of Latin and Greek and the Differential 
Calculus have been so unpractical, so juiceless, so 
dyspeptic, so uninteresting anr 1 ninterested that 
Horace Greeley was goaded into saying, "Of all 
horned cattle, deliver me from the college graduate." 
A worse mistake of educated men is the early 
development of a hypercritical repressive habit of 
mind which is characteristically and unvaryingly 
displeased ; which arrogates to itself a sort of mental 
and moral censorship. It criticizes everything and 
suggests nothing. It is debilitating and suffocating 
to youth and finds its largest expression from the 
ranks of the unappreciated. It develops the idea 
that nothing is to be done worth doing, except in a 
way that it never yet was done. If destructive criti- 
cism demolished only what it does not like (and it is 
a no-one-to-love feeling) I would not tarry to defend 
you against it. But it is invariably self-destructive. 
If, as you begin to write an essay, you begin with 
the same moment to exercise a critical judgment, 
there will be no essay. Produce your essay before 
you judge it. It is a law of art that a picture is 
not to be judged by its faults. It may be still a great 

[12] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

picture and stand with the ten masterpieces of the 
world. "Our Harvard way," said Phillips Brooks, 
"is on the whole to treat life on its negative side. 
We are more afraid of believing something that we 
ought not to believe than of not believing something 
we ought to believe." But, friends, the world wants 
today the man that does things. The graduate we 
wait for is he who brings things to pass. The man 
for the times is the one who succeeds in doing the 
thing to be done, ,_ 

Another "piece of my mind" which I will 
exhibit is this: A mistake of educated men is in 
dwarfing yourselves, your living interests, your 
observation and studies down to that subdivision of 
labor which your specialty presents. When men of 
the same class and of the same interests herd exclu- 
sively together, they always degenerate. Here you 
find, too, a breeding place for bigots, fanatics and 
cranks. As a board can be easiest carried with its 
end to the wind, so it is true that any man can be 
projected farthest who presents the thinnest edge to 
the world. Once there were lawyers, but now in 
cities there are criminal lawyers, real estate lawyers, 
title lawyers, solicitors of patents and, (dis- 
tinguished even from these) are patent lawyers, and 
so the line indefinitely extends into a list too long for 
me to even catalogue. Nor can I quote the column, 
like oculists, aurists, neurologists or specialists in 
the practice of medicine. A vocation is now called 
a pursuit, and you see the figure implied in the word. 

[i3] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

Now, if a man moves only on one line, what shall 
keep him out of ruts, deep and abiding like those 
uncovered after eighteen hundred years in the 
ancient watering place of Pompeii, worn down full 
half a foot into solid stone. Division of labor has 
been practiced until it is said that 

" 'Twill employ seven men to make a perfect pin; 

Who makes the head, contents to miss the point; 

Who makes the point, contents to leave the joining; 

And if a man should say, 'I want a pin, 

And I must make it straightway, head and point.' 

His wisdom is not worth the pin he wants. 

Seven men, then, to a pin and not a man too much." 

If one's physical development was as one sided 
as a man who is only a specialist becomes, he would 
be pointed out as eccentric and monstrous. He 
knows the world, as somebody says, "a mite knows 
cheese." The mite is born in cheese, lives in cheese, 
beholds cheese, eats cheese. If he thinks at all his 
thoughts are of cheese. The cheese press, curds and 
whey, the frothy pail, the milkmaid, cow and pasture 
enter not the mite's imagination at all. But in seek- 
ing to stimulate in you the development of the 
"Scholar's Larger Life," as you are certain to fall 
into specialties, let me encourage each of you to 
adopt both a vocation and an avocation. Agriculture 
was the vocation of the first president of the Repub- 
lic and he says of it : "Farming is the most useful and 
the most noble employment of mankind. ' ' It was his 
avocation, however, that established his unequaled 
fame. Let a man be a stationer in his vocation and 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

in his avocation he may serve upon a school com- 
mittee or develop the project of a public library or 
work honestly in his ward caucus, and while through 
his vocation he earns the meat that perishes, through 
his avocation he swings an influence that makes life 
tell till the last syllable of recorded time. This, you 
see, equalizes callings, for I care not what is a man's 
vocation if through some avocation he serves his 
generation. In his vocation a man may be the manu- 
facturer of rubber belting, but in his avocation he 
may become the founder of Wellesley College. He 
may be a manufacturer of glue and lay the founda- 
tion of Cooper Institute. In his vocation he may 
be nothing but a tent maker. Would you prescribe 
for him, then, only a cunning right hand and see no 
need of philosophic lore, when in his avocation he 
may become the leading writer of the New Testa- 
ment and the Chief Apostle to the Gentiles? Would 
you, or would you not, because his vocation was but 
a handicraft, deny the man of Tarsus to sit at 
Gamaliel's feet, when in the exercise of his avoca- 
tion he is to stand on the spot where Demosthenes 
thundered his ponderous Philippics, where Socrates 
spoke for his life, and say, "Ye men of Athens," to 
the most accomplished and brilliant people the 
civilized world has ever known, and confound Epi- 
cureans and Stoics with the strange doctrine of 
Jesus and the Resurrection? 

And thus, Children of this beloved College, have 
I striven to bring you face to face with that inspiring 

[15] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

object of contemplation which in my own heart I 
have named: 

The Scholar's Larger Life 

Scholarship, I have considered as an increment 
of power. It is the overplus that tells. It is this 
intellectual augment that gives zest and quality to 
what is otherwise flat and dull. It is the last touch 
that gilds the scholar's life. Where lay the sweet- 
ness that moved the audience when Antoinette Ster- 
ling sang ? Before her others had appeared and had 
been well received. The thunder which greeted her 
first appearance immediately subsided and a stillness 
of death prevailed as she sang, " Where is Heaven, 
Mother?' ' When she ceased, the audience seemed 
breathless for an instant, and then a vast torrent of 
applause surged through and through the crowded 
house, and rose at last to deafening cheers. It was 
evident that a single woman towered far above every 
other singer, above the splendid orchestra, above 
everything. What gave her the right to be heard? 
What gave her power in being heard? It was the 
last degree of sweetness. Almost any one, to use 
his phrase, can sing a little. The last inch marks 
the tallest men. It is the last six inches that win 
the race, when it is horse and horse. It is the over- 
flow of life and love that makes one strong in his 
sympathies. It is what is "more" than a doctor and 
a trader that gives society a margin. It may be that 
for any voyage a ship has yet made, a boy could have 
commanded her. But there is no notice served upon 

[16] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

a vessel before she leaves the company's dock, as to 
the character of a voyage she is to make. "Old 
Ocean's gray and melancholy waste" may seem like 
a pond extending to the horizon's outmost rim. But 
"the unplumbed, the salt, the estranging sea" stands 
nowhere pledged to smooth sailing. With but few 
notes of prelude, and to the hoarse music of the 
hurricane, a ship may be summoned to the dance of 
death. The whole horizon may seem to swim with 
moving mountains of water. Down she may plunge 
with a side swing burying her bow in the base of 
some advancing wave. If she should ship a sea that 
would put out her fires and stop her machinery by 
which she is made to quarter on the waves, she 
would inevitably fall into the trough and founder. 
Now, when she falls to laboring heavily, when such 
a terrific confused sea is running that she can scarce 
live for an hour in it, when from her critical and 
exposed position the best she can do is to drive down 
to strike at the foundation of some huge wall of 
water which fences her way, those passengers 
huddled together in the saloon want to feel that 
there strides that bridge a man skilled and disci- 
plined, more than a man, a captain; more than a 
captain, a master of the ship and of the situation, 
who can, as if with excess of power, lift his finger, 
beckoning a return to the bow of that vessel and 
she, like a thing with charmed life, will hasten to 
obey his motion and arise as from the grave. The 
man was chosen for his position with reference to 

[*7] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

what might happen. He who is distinguished, must 
have something to distinguish him. 

Young gentlemen and young ladies of the grad- 
uating class, you have come to one of the most im- 
portant epochs of your earthly career. It is by far 
the most significant, aside from your religious life, 
that you have yet reached. So far, you have been 
mainly under the direction of instructors chosen by 
yourselves or friends to direct and aid you in your 
work. Henceforth the guidance of your lives will 
be more completely in your own hands. Over a 
great, new building at Yale College are inscribed the 
words by Bacon: "Blessed be he that cometh in and 
blessed be he that goeth out." But the blessing of 
the "going" could never have had its richness and 
largeness and fullness, except for the blessing of the 
coming. Even the families to which you respectively 
belong can never be the same after a son or a daugh- 
ter graduates from college. Whatever pride your 
fathers may feel in you, it is far outshone by the 
benediction that is breathed upon you today by the 
graduate's mother. Behold her, all ye people! She 
may have given her all for you, and as you now rise 
up to call her blessed (where she now lives on earth, 
or among the shining ones in heaven) there will be 
no honor that by her will be undeserved. You have 
not in your Alma Mater the hoar antiquity of the 
old-world-colleges, but you remember the reply made 
by a celebrated English Statesman when taunted 
with being a "young man," "I plead guilty, my lord, 
but the fault will mend every day. ' ' You have not 

[18J 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

yet the historic associations which cluster about and 
haunt the gray walls and dim cloisters of Oxford, 
but you have a future that will make your past 
radiant. A system of education that can supply the 
product exhibited by you in your Classday exer- 
cises is the best in the world. I could see how among 
you there had been going on a process of what I will 
call "leveling up." Once, for example, in the re- 
ligious education of young men, the dependence was 
upon certain leaders of religious thought outside of 
the student body. The religious life of Williams 
College depended, for instance, upon Professor 
Albert Hopkins, brother of the president, Mark 
Hopkins. And Amherst College depended upon 
the Amherst Socrates, the Attic Bee, Professor 
Tyler. But in all colleges including, recently, even 
Wellesley, the last to resist the revolution, young 
men and women now in a degree never before seen 
in the history of the mind, educate one another 
religiously. The development of your religious life 
has been largely a mutual matter, and I venture to 
affirm that no class was ever graduated from an 
American college where members gained so many 
of the excellent things in educational development 
from an associated life. It is plain to an observer 
that you possess more class spirit — which made 
your exercises yesterday so radiant — than you 
could have known, except that you have wrought 
upon one another in your lateral relations as a class. 
The college community became to you a little re- 
public in which you have been trained for citizenship 

[i9] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

in a larger world. You are now to make places for 
yourselves in life, in much the same way that you 
have already done this in the estimation of your 
college contemporaries. Some of you have done so 
by your brightness, some by social sparkle, some by 
conspicuous truth of character, some by accomplish- 
ment, some by talent, some by acquired gifts or 
graces of speech, some by outright diligence; some 
achieved a place in your class history by a little 
accidental occurrence, some by connecting the life 
of the college with the life of the community, and 
some unselfish labors for those less favored than 
yourself in this unequal world. Thus have you 
already shown your aptitude for the work and play 
of life. Do not belong to the college a little. Young 
friends, never lose your fresh enthusiasm for Old 
Alma Mater. I want you to feel that your college is 
the best in this state or any other. Doubtless God 
could have made a better college, doubtless he never 
did. You are her glory, her joy and her crown. To 
fail in gratitude toward her, who nourished you 
through four years of undergraduate life, would be 
evidence prima facie that your moral nature was 
blunted and that the decadence even of the college 
must begin. But today, you enter life's larger school- 
house. Going out over this threshold you are at 
once in a great University which confers no degrees. 
Today a vast new world opens her doors hospitably 
to you. May the soul of work acquired, evidently 
here, never be crushed out. The most important 
single question that ever comes to you is this : ' ' Shall 

[20] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

I make of my life a career or a mission ? ' ' In a career, 
self is first and last and midst. But in a mission, self 
is subordinated to the service of a cause. As I stood 
yesterday amazed, delighted, captured, by your 
overflowing spirit, your brilliancy and your deep 
tone of earnestness, my heart said to me — you are 
to have the final word, name then a cause for which 
to live and love. I'll do it. It may be then that the 
most devoted among you will adopt it for a life's 
mission. I name it. It is briefly comprehended in 
one word, "Otherism." Look not every one upon 
his own interests only. "Otherism" will set your 
useful purpose to the right key. The color of your 
whole life will probably be such as the first years in 
which you are your own masters make it. For you 
the critical, decisive hour in earth's whole pro- 
gramme is now here. Be open hearted. Be open 
handed. Live your best. When you pass yonder 
chapel door today, you may say, I have cheerfully 
spent my last dollar for a good education, and what 
have I as I face the world which has crowned so 
many others — what have I? I have my hope. The 
college is like a railroad locomotive on a turning table, 
ready to take some one of many tracks leading from 
it. Get on some track, young friends, and stay on. 
By years of preparation you are made ready to be 
turned to any kind of productive work. It is the 
custom in oriental countries for the ruling sovereign 
to spend large sums of money and great pains in the 
education of the prince who is to succeed to the 
throne. But your life is cast in America, and the 

[21] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

Children of America are all princes. So, in England, 
as I have just read, there are families that date back 
to the days of the Norman Conqueror and are justly 
proud of their ancient and honorable lineage. They 
have gathered the precious heirlooms of the cen- 
turies. Here, is a sword wielded at Cressy. There, 
is a necklace of gems, the gift of a king. Here, is 
a service of plate wrought by the cunning workmen 
of the Middle Ages. Here, is a castellated home 
built in the days of the Tudors. Here, are ancestral 
oaks planted in the days of Elizabeth. The dying 
old lord is leaving it all, handing it over to his sons 
and daughters to preserve unimpaired and to enrich 
with new monumental treasures. Young friends, 
today you become of age. You are heirs of vast 
intellectual treasures. Your lineage is a lineage of 
noble minds that have themselves loved and in- 
herited the truth. In your veins may not flow the 
blood of an Augustine but in your mind there live 
and move the thoughts of a Plato, a Kepler, a New- 
ton, a Socrates, an Agassiz, and an Edwards. To 
you now, in turn, the intellectual succession, the 
rich accumulated treasures of mind and heart are 
committed. Dr. McCosh used to advise the members 
of a graduating class to spend an hour in quiet medi- 
tation before they left the classic walls of Princeton, 
and found themselves in the busy outside world. 
So, sometime today or tomorrow, between quitting 
these walls and entering upon a new stage of action, 
have a silent hour. A camel kneels to receive his 
burden, and has the. instinct to rise unbidden when 

[22] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

he feels he is loaded commensurate with his strength. 
In order that you may be freighted again by the 
"Pierced Hands/ ' lay down your present responsi- 
bilities and be separated for an hour from them, to 
accept them again afresh, closing thus your college 
day and beginning with earnest devotion life's great 
tomorrow. 

The camel, at the close of day 

Kneels down upon the sandy plain 

To have his burden lifted off 
And rest again. 

My soul, thou too, should ? st to thy knees 

When daylight draweth to a close 
And let the Master lift the load 

And grant repose. 

The camel kneels at break of day 
To have his guide replace his load. 

Then rises up anew to take 
A desert road. 

So thou should'st kneel at morning's dawn 
That God may give thee daily care, 

Assured that He no load too great 
Will make thee bear. 



[23] 



II 

A JUBILEE ADDRESS* 

Like the unfolding of a realistic panorama, the 
stirring scenes of the Civil War have been passing 
before my quickened sight. As we recede farther 
away from the confusion, the gloom, the clouds and 
the later inbreaking sunshine of the contest for the 
preservation of the Union, certain clearly defined pic- 
tures rise before us, which are not taken from the 
chamber of imagery, but from the living fields of his- 
tory. And yet those four years of strife do not even 
now seem to be United States annals, but a separate 
epoch, a gulf, a sacrifice, a conflagration. New reputa- 
tions were abruptly hung like banners in our temples, 
men were changed to giants and names became famous 
and infamous as lastingly as Caesar and Cataline. 
Appoint to one of us then the theme, "The College in 
the Civil War/' and many a local event at once looms 
up on a dark background like a volcano in the night, 
by which too we see deeper meanings than its own 
salient fame. One vivid memory is the reception on 
this ground, where now we are gathered, of the news 
from Vicksburg at a commencement appointment in 
1863. Loyal hearts had everywhere been depressed. 
Our disaster at Fredericksburg, followed by our rout 



*At the Semi- Centennial celebration of Grinnell College this ad- 
dress was given on the relation of the author's Alma Mater to the 
Civil War. 



[24] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

at Chancellorsville, when not our soldiers, but our gen- 
erals had been defeated, as 22,000 of our men were not 
brought into action at all, had produced a condition 
of things that was little less than desperate. In some 
new quarters the success of secession began to be ad- 
mitted as not impossible. Volunteering began to flag 
and drafts became the unpopular resort. Desertions 
became never so frequent. Our national currency, 
which is always quick to detect the feelings of the pop- 
ular heart, sank to its nadir. The confederacy was 
growing daily more expectant of foreign recognition 
and the rebels, having been successful, were enthusi- 
astic and presuming. Northern hearts were strained 
to a tension that was simply intolerable. It was the 
darkest hour of the rebellion. The new strategist from 
Galena, just coming into recognition, had defied the 
best known law of armies, not to cut themselves off 
from their base of supplies, and had put himself 
where, for some days, he was not to be heard from. 
The Fourth Iowa Cavalry, in which were fifteen of 
our choicest college spirits, was known to have been 
engaged. Throughout the vast audience, as it 
gathered here that night was felt the very pain of in- 
tensity, the agony of suspense. The tidings produced 
an indescribable sensation. Jacob Butler, one of our 
trustees, whose law partner, 'Conner, it was thought 
by him might have been slain, was put forward to 
voice the pent-up feelings of the crowd. His oratory 
rose to unapproached heights. As I stand here to-day 
I can still feel its thrill, its ardor, its pathos and its 
power. Since the earth was set in motion there 

[25] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

had never been, in the whole world's history, so large 
a capture of generals, of whom there were fifteen, and 
of armament and men as Gen. Grant made at Vicks- 
burg. As our orator, having no mean gifts, rose to 
the elevation of his theme, his locks, which, after the 
more frequent customs of those days, were worn 
long, were thrown violently from shoulder to shoulder. 
Burning with the excitement of the occasion, his elo- 
quence flamed to its utmost height, as he looked out 
upon the sea of upturned faces. The applause was 
tumultuous. A famous solo singer advanced across 
the platform. The early hush of the eager, expectant 
audience was evidence of the depth of emotion. She 
took up nothing less than the Marsellaise, "Ye Sons of 
Freedom Wake to Glory. ' ' Enthusiasms were without 
bounds. That song was a distinct event in my life. It 
is a great privation to any human soul never to have 
heard a great song on a great occasion. The land was 
passing from hurricane into calm. Our college boys 
had transformed themselves into heroes by 
"Deeds of great hearts true and strong, 

Deeds eclipsing Marathon; 

Deeds deserving endless song, 

Deeds above Napoleon." 

Never will the time come, unless there intervenes 
some strange and unaccountable degeneracy of our 
people, when the uplifting force of the American idea 
shall fail which was projected first beneath oppres- 
sion, then below slavery, and is now making itself felt 
under the despotism, cruelty and inhumanity of 
unprogressive Spain; for God, who has sown in our 

[26] 



A JUBILEE ADDRESS 

soil the seed of his millennial harvest, will not lay the 
sickle until his full and perfect day has come. 

All the civilizations to-day existing were in their 
origins largely the result of great upheavals. Over- 
coming the strict conservation of peace, like that in 
China and India, the redemption from kingcraft and 
oppression and despotism and cruelty has come not 
from evolution merely, but from revolution, which has 
proved not destructive only, but constructive. The 
light of that expanding miracle from Jamestown to 
Appomatox gilds to-day the names of Admiral Dewey, 
and Lieut. Hobson, and Osborne W. Deignan, of 
Stuart, Iowa, brave son of a not less heroic mother, 
living in a state where patriotism is indigenous and 
where heroes are grown as well as cattle and corn. 
Students here will search in vain the annals of the 
planet for another expensive war like that reluctantly 
begun by our noble president with a like unselfish, 
progressive, exalted motive. In the unfolding of 
nations the time had simply come for Spanish cruelty 
to cease. In the murky waters of Havana's benighted 
bay, beneath the Maine a torpedo was placed. Cruel 
Spain touched the button and Uncle Sam will do the 
rest. 

The next turn of the phonograph on whose 
cylinder has been placed the foil of memory, enables 
us to listen to the public reading of a daily paper. 
On the arrival of the mail, part of the time by coach 
from the terminus of the railroad thirty miles east, 
the postmaster, well-remembered, would throw out 
through a side door, the Davenport Gazette, then our 

[27] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

chief paper from our leading city, and some educated 
man, usually Mr. Quincy A. Gilmore, would stand 
up to read. Through his pronunciation I first gained 
familiarity with Antietam, Chickahominy, Chica- 
maugua, Kenesaw, Murfresboro and Paducah, and so 
on through the 2,261 battles for the union, in which 
500 soldiers were engaged from Manassas Junction 
to Appomattox. Individual families did not have a 
daily paper in those primitive days, and so you might 
see the crowd gather silently around the postoffice 
door, collecting from all quarters as if the birds of the 
air had spread the apprehension. Sometimes an in- 
dividual man would be seen to stagger as if he had 
been hit, and sometimes a woman seemed attacked by 
faintness, as if it were herself and not her husband 
or son that was in danger of being struck down. As 
heard from that mournful paper, with what force 
came to our ears the reverberant tones of memory's 
bells, tolling bells. Shiloh losses 13,500, Stone Eiver 
11,578, seven days' retreat and Malvern Hill, 15,279, 
Wilderness 37,737. 

Familiar, at least with its street scenes, I am 
here to bear witness that no more patriotic or loyal 
place than our college town existed in this state or in 
any other. It was always brimming full of purest 
Americanism. This came in part from the presence of 
so many students from poor but ambitious homes. The 
material supplied the army by enlistments here was of 
a high character. No one considered what the pay 
would be, or the hardships, or the perils. Touched 
with generous impulses, fired with an uncalculating 

[28] 



A JUBILEE ADDRESS 

spirit, still the college was represented in the war by 
mere boys. Major Rhea, past commander of the 
Grand Army, affirms that the average of our soldiers 
at enlistment was but nineteen, and our G-rinnell Col- 
lege contingent was younger than the average. Iowa, 
a youthful state, while furnishing 84,017 soldiers, sent 
but one regiment of Silver Greys into the service and 
that was the 37th, average age 65 years, under a call 
from President Lincoln to do guard duty, but they 
had the proud distinction of having fifteen hundred 
sons in the war. Our students being so young, could 
not have been enticed into a military life by the hope 
of rank and preferment, yet we came to have a major, 
like Joseph Lyman, captains like Russell E. Jones and 
John Carr, lieutenants (12) like Cardell, Baker, Scott, 
Bailey, Daily, Anderson, Work, John W. Jones, San- 
born, Shanklin, Kelsey, and our learned, honored and 
popular Professor Leonard F. Parker; adjutants like 
Ela; sergeants like Hon. John M. Carney, Pruyn, 
Chapman and Hobart; clerks in the regimental 
service like Kierulff, Manatt and Herrick; and musi- 
cians like Quaife, Ford, and Dana H. Robbins. We 
must remember gratefully that every one of our 
student volunteers, though still living, counting life 
no longer dear to himself, offered it willingly upon the 
altar of his country, and forsook all that he had and 
followed the flag, willing to die beneath its starry 
folds. Those with us today came back as the waves 
come, which break and sink back into the sea when 
they reach the beach. A host of our surviving 
veterans have held positions of distinction as civilians, 

[29] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

whom I have catalogued and would name, except that 
the noblest service has been often rendered with no 
sounding titles. Such men were the flower of the 
country. They had one common, enthusiastic, intelli- 
gent, life-losing, but heaven-inspired patriotism. The 
war, a rare testing time, checked for a period the con- 
servatism of our civilization, made every man stand 
squarely upon both his feet with all the props and 
braces of home and society taken away. Some re- 
turned broken in health, like Kelsey, Ford, Scott and 
Chapman ; others wounded, like Baker, Cardell, Baily, 
Bishop, Austin and Carr, to receive the plaudits of 
their countrymen. To estimate the services of the 
46th Regiment, in whose Company "B" the College 
had its largest representation, twenty-six men, we need 
to read it; in the devastation 300 miles long and 60 
broad, in 200 miles of railroad broken up and in a 
hundred million dollars of damage wrought to the 
confederacy by that romantic march to the sea, where 
sixty thousand men disappeared from sight for thirty- 
one days and emerged at last as if from a wilderness, 
with undiminished; numbers and resources and 
increased renown, which our boys in part made 
possible. 

No one can fully understand the war of the rebel- 
lion, without getting hold of it on the northern side 
from the Kansas end. We were here granted par- 
ticular insight into antecedent movements which 
precipitated the great rebellion. That day was a high 
day when that generous soul, nature's freeman an 
ideal citizen, that friend of the town, church, college, 

[30] 



A JUBILEE ADDRESS 

and well-wisher of every young man or woman who, 
by reason of sacrifice at home came hither to study, 
Hon. J. B. Grinnell sent over to our home for i l one of 
our boys" to drive a covered wagon containing fugi- 
tives guilty of a skin not colored like our own, the 
journey to be chiefly by night, to the western terminus 
of the railroad that was making its way slowly up 
from Iowa City. We understood that John Brown, 
who still has a room named in honor of his occupancy 
here, did not expect to liberate all slaves, but by 
opening thoroughfares, to cause them to be held upon 
such an uncertain tenure that they would become 
practically worthless as chattels. From his own hand 
writing I copy words revealing his idea. "I had 
flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it 
might be done. " From my life here I imbibed a liking 
for that tall, lank figure, with the pompadour hair, 
and with much painstaking I have visited his haunts. 
I have acquired one of his rifles, and chiefly a John 
Brown pike, very rare and difficult to secure, manu- 
factured by hand, on an anvil, still standing, with 
which to arm slaves at Harper's Ferry, which I shall 
ask the college to accept. Our geographical position 
here contiguous to a slave state, occasioned the suspen- 
sion of college studies, when we were called out at 
night to go into a region south of us to capture the 
bushwhackers who, obscure beside the road, at a spot 
forever etched upon my memory, shot the provost 
marshal from our college town who had gone down to 
arrest drafted men who had not reported, and were 
hence classed with deserters. Finding one of these 

[3i] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

assassins wounded, who persisted in being reticent 
about the shooting, one of our posse went into the 
stable and brought in the heavy rope of a halter, in 
which a noose was made, the other end thrown over a 
joist above in the unfinished room, and the man given 
two minutes in which to tell his story or to say his 
prayers, as he might elect. Vividly do I still see the 
group of prisoners first guarded on the lawn of Mr. 
Craver, father of Charles and Samuel and sainted 
Thomas, and last in the wool warehouse near the local 
Rock Island freight house. 

I remember the part taken by students in the 
demonstration when our foremost citizen, Mr. Grin- 
nell, was stricken, Sumner-like, in congress by that 
ruffian from Kentucky. I remember that when any- 
thing of serious importance occurred we would come 
together at the church in the evening, never seeming 
in those days to distinguish between our politics and 
our religion. I remember the Sunday morning audi- 
ence, deeply affected by the news from Petersburg, 
when the minister said, ' ' I cannot preach, ' ' thus dis- 
missing us to roll bandages and pick lint for the 
wounded, to pack large boxes the size of an upright 
piano, and to reinforce the sanitary commission 
(served in the field by Hon. Robert M. Haines and 
Rev. Seth A. Arnold) that is estimated by Col. Benton 
to have saved 180,000 lives. 

I remember the amazement of a distinguished 
visitor finding he was about to address here an audi- 
ence alive with students, on a political theme, sat 
seeking to prime himself with a funny story with 

[32] 



A JUBILEE ADDRESS 

which to catch the crowd, when a professional, bookish- 
looking individual, with solemn bearing, advancing to 
the front of the plaform, said "Let lis pray." I re- 
member the long procession of cavalry that passed the 
door of our solitary college building on its way, as it 
proved, to the battle fields, the cemeteries and the 
prison pens of the South. I remember that the 
students turned out to visit them at their encampment 
in the grove west of town, to see them tether their 
horses, cook their coffee, spread their blankets and 
light up their tents with candles held in an iron 
mould that was pushed into the ground. I remember 
how they sang, "The Girl I Left Behind Me," "Just 
Before the Battle, Mother," "John Brown's Body," 



i i 



Oh, thus be it e'er when freemen shall stand, 



Between their loved home and the war's desolation, 
Blessed with victory and peace, may the Heaven rescued 

land 
Praise the power that hath made and preserved us a 

nation. J * 

I remember the rank patriotism that pervaded our 
earliest college declamations. "Stand, the ground's 
your own, my braves." Patrick Henry being the 
favorite and Spartacus a close second. I remember 
the animating, thrilling music made here to incite 
enlistments, by simply a fife and drum, in affecting 
recollection of which I have secured a snare drum 
carried in the battle of Gettysburg, with an affidavit 
proving it, which I shall ask the College to accept. 
I remember the warmth of the meetings held in the 
old school house on this square, when the patriotism 

[33] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

was generated that caused the many students of Com- 
pany E of the 4th Iowa Cavalry to enlist. I remember 
their drill on these grounds about this church, and the 
pathetic scenes that attended their departure for the 
front. 

I remember the exploits, too numerous to mention, 
of individual Grinnell College men, who, for example, 
like Lieutenant Thomas T. Baker, now of Butte, Mon- 
tana, on the day before Lee surrendered, marched on 
foot fifty-eight miles and during the summer before 
this marched eighteen hundred miles. I remember 
accompanying Co. B. of the 46th Regiment eastward 
to witness in a sort of town meeting, its election of 
officers, with whom I thought the common soldiers 
were too astonishingly familiar. I remember how 
these recruits, some of whom never had a gun in their 
hands before, who shut up their grammars and lexi- 
cons with a bang, carrying their extra clothing in a 
paper bundle, when togged out in the accoutrements 
a complete set of which, tin dipper, canteen, knap- 
sack, haversack, musket, and bayonet carried through- 
out the war, having been at length sceured, I shall 
ask the college to accept. I remember how the merest 
lads, left at home, first hung and then burned in the 
streets the ef&gy of that man whom I never attempt to 
classify, J. Davis, who betrayed the flag under which 
he learned to drill at his country's expense, who at 
length ran away with the money belonging to the 
soldiers and tried at last to be his own mother-in-law, 
and failed as usual. I remember how the war, forcing 
a condition of affairs never before known, opened wide 

[34] 



A JUBILEE ADDRESS 

the doors to woman, whose meritorious services in the 
south, as in the case of Mary E. Snell, no figures can 
estimate. 

I remember the invalid days of those returning 
home to still look death steadily in the face, like Scott, 
with whom I once roomed, and Ford, whom I visited, 
but by whose pale lips no word of complaint was ever 
syllabled, nor of regret that they had served their 
country at such a frightful cost. At the head of the 
lake of the Forest Canyons, at the foot of a terraced 
garden, across a calm, leaf-shadowed pool, cut into 
the precipitous rock is the realization of Thorwald- 
sen's great thought, the dying Lion of Lucerne. 
Nothing can be more majestic than his attitude. He 
has exhausted his strength in battle. His body is 
pierced by a mortal arrow.* There is something al- 
most human in the face, in those eyes and the drooping 
mouth. The agony is expressed in every line of that 
sad strong face. Nothing in ancient sculpture, not 
even the dying gladiator portrays more of mournful 
dignity in death. There is a soul in his look. Never 
was an act of courage more simply and yet more 
grandly set forth. This memorial commemorates the 
valor of the Swiss guards who were massacred in 
Paris during the first revolution. They were sentinels 
about the person of Louis Sixteenth. A paw of the 
lion droops in such a way as to point to their immortal 
names. Great grief has few words, but they are these ; 
11 August 10th, and September 2nd and 3rd, 1792. 
These are the names of those who, not to be found 
wanting to the sacred faith of their oath, bravely 

[35] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

fighting fell." Mourning her sons, whose gallant de- 
fense of our Union and our flag cost them their noble 
lives, Grinnell College points to their names, inscribed 
upon the tablet at the entrance of Alumni Hall. Here 
is a monument that has not outlived its history, like 
those of the mound builders, containing unintelligible 
relics of a forgotten race, when even tradition supplies 
nothing for them to commemorate. Primeval forests 
have flourished above them and decayed. Who knows 
what secret of science, or religion, astronomy, or 
numbers, or priest or architect, or king, the pyramids 
of Egypt guard. In the distant quarries from which 
they and Memnon came, single stones already cut, so 
vast that a hundred regiments could hardly move 
them, still wait, as they have for forty centuries for 
workmen and for wains that never came to take them. 
While building the monument of its heroes, the 
Nation has forgotten why those heroes died. This 
memorial of ours, however seems instinct with a love 
that floods could not drown nor a hurricane efface. 
Like the old clock at Vicksburg, that continued its 
tick, tick, tick, when all the city beside was swept by 
Gen. Grant's cannon, so this tablet was saved as by a 
miracle when our college buildings were swept from 
the face of the earth by a cyclone's besom. Her feel- 
ings too are those of sorrow, mingled with pride. She 
laments her unmeasured loss. She had fancied them 
shining resplendent in a constellation of letters. 
Their life closed at its climax. Others grow old, but 
these sons are endowed with immortal youth : — Jones, 
Loring, Shanklin, Cassady, Ellis, Craver, Dowd who 



A JUBILEE ADDRESS 

was starved at Andersonville, Hobbs, Holland and 
Thompson. These all died from one cause. Let us 
believe with Socrates, as he listened to Timarchus, that 
the heroes and sages and martyrs of the past are not 
indifferent in the present to the sacred objects and 
companions of their lives. 

There is a beautiful fancy of pagan mythology, 
which contends that soldiers who have been distin- 
guished in battle are allowed to meet in the happy 
fields of Elysium and talk over the events of the 
contest in which they engaged. Can we not imagine 
that those who have gone down to their windowless 
homes, furloughed this week from their relentless 
bondage of the grave, are with us sympathetically 
and are aware of our presence upon these classic 
grounds which they once chose to tread, and hence 
know that we are here in part to commemorate their 
devotion. We have come to wipe away the dust from 
the earlier picture of our Alma Mater. To retouch 
it and reframe it and to hold it up to men, that they 
should admire her part in reuniting the nation and 
emancipating the slaves. Hail to a college that can 
boast such sons, and that in 1862 held back from her 
country's service no one male student who was fit by 
his years for military duty. Hail to the Collegians 
that took up the "Ark of the Covenant " and bore it 
forward, before whom God divided the waters, and set 
it beyond danger in peace, in security and in honor. 
Hail to the men that in the face of rebel obstruction 
cried, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord," and cleared 
the highway that the mighty pageant of a free people 

[37] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

could pass on to its glory. Hail to the heroes that 
made a United States history that will shine with in- 
creasing luster, the cynosure of the misruled, the per- 
secuted and the oppressed. All honor to Levi C. Ela, 
who was the first from Grinnell College to enlist, and 
to Norman F. Bates, who captured a rebel flag in that 
night attack at Columbus. All honor to the Fourth 
Iowa Cavalry, traveling 12,000 miles, becoming the 
first veteran volunteer regiment from Iowa, receiving 
a costly silk flag from the Loyal Woman's League, 
standing at length as victors, having captured the 
capital of Alabama, in the very audience chamber 
where the first organized secession movement began. 
All honor to Lieutenant Thomas T. Baker, Grin- 
nell College's Goliath of Gath, detailed April 9th, 
1865, at Appomattox as commander of 100 men to 
assist at the surrender of General Lee to General 
Grant, in receiving the confederate arms, drawing up 
his line of provost guards when the confederate cav- 
alry and infantry marched up and threw their arms 
in a long pile before him, and the great rebellion was 
over. Praise be to God that has given us a generation 
of national life bright with his light and better 
deserving study than a whole century of history in 
any other time or of any other people. All honor to 
our professors in those self-denying days, who com- 
municated the spirit and set the step for our martial 
expressions. Hail to the brave, clean, beautiful town 
of Grinnell, friend of the student, field of his strug- 
gles, and the ideal of his later labors in temperance, 
good citizenship and in general helpfulness toward all 

[38] 



A JUBILEE ADDRESS 

those whose ambition exceeds their resources. Hail to 
the Alma Mater, nourisher of missionaries, and patriots 
in commemoration of whose fiftieth birthday a multi- 
tude of her children have come together to do her 
honor and to say ' ' Thank you, Mother, Live Forever. y ' 
Hail Grinnell College, whose roots are gone down into 
the regions of perpetual spring, whose life is vital 
and whose future is assured. 

"Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, 
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, 
Are all with thee, are all with thee." 



lay] 



Ill 

LOVE OF COUNTRY 

A Royal Grace of Character — An Over-Sweeping 

Virtue 

There is one scene which, by reason of many 
suggestions connected with this sadly interesting 
and significant service, keeps rising upon my sight. 
It represents the first grenadier of France. Such 
was his nobility and such his humility that he, dis- 
daining promotion, preferred fighting on in the 
ranks, continuing his faithful service until he fell, 
the foremost of the brave. Such was his spirit — 
and the inspiration of his death — that Napoleon 
ordered his name should be called as if he was 
still a part of the living and effective force of the 
army. Hence his name was kept upon the rolls, 
and as often as its syllables were pronounced, the 
sergeant of his company stepped two paces forward 
and saluted and gave this answer: "Dead upon the 
field of Honor." Such men cannot die. Life with 
them has a resurrection, a power which death only 
can heighten. I have thought much of these words 
as the graves of your comrades have been strewn 
with flowers. I look off to "God's Acre/' where 
lies the turf in many a mouldering heap, and your 
roll, read here in our hearing, suggests many that 
are dead upon the field of honor. But they are not 

[40] 



LOVE OF COUNTRY 

dead. By laying down their lives they came to 
earthly immortality. They live in our memories. 
Their example lives. They live in a redeemed and 
in a re-united nation, for the maintenance of whose 
institutions they stained the field with blood. So 
have I stood among the graves at Arlington Heights 
until more than fifteen thousand of our valiant men 
seemed to surround me. When I commune with 
them they say to my spirit, "All this sacrifice was 
for just one cause. There is no diversity of senti- 
ment among us. We died for just one thing, and 
that one object is worth to you all that it is in our 
power to give." And there, as here upon this plat- 
form, is a memorial to the unknown dead. Beneath 
one stone repose the bones of 2,111 of our citizens 
gathered from the fields of Bull Run and the route 
of the Rappahannock that could not be identified. 
But their names and deaths are recorded in their 
country's archives, and they are honored by their 
grateful countrymen as a part of their noble army 
of martyrs. And in thought I move on to the prison- 
pens of Andersonville, where 15,000 of our men for 
months looked death steadily in the face, reaffirming 
their choice to serve their country, amid the suffer- 
ings of each succeeding day. They would not be 
paroled. We may exclaim in the choice words read 
to us by your chaplain — "Oh! Grave, where is 
thy victory?" He is the victor who, like Grant, 
names the terms. They will not yield their fealty 
to country. Thus they suffered a seven-fold death, 
and yet they are not dead. We feel their inspira- 

[4i] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

tion today. They are making a majestic march 
towards new heights of fame. And now at Rich- 
mond we find vast fields where the billowing sod has 
been torn and ripped to open the graves for 70,000 
of our immortal dead. And thus our thought 
extends until, beginning with the 300,000 men who 
had filled soldiers' graves ere our strife was done 
— who are now recruited from the 280,000 men who 
had been wounded in battle — until today it can be 
affirmed that not less than a half-million of loyal 
graves appeal to us for a worthy commemoration 
on this Memorial day. And the graves; how their 
number swells with each succeeding year. I thought 
of the advance toward the eternal camping grounds 
as I heard your measured and heavy tread upon the 
street today. Tramp ! Tramp ! Tramp ! I see them 
march toward their tenting places beyond the dark 
river at the rate of a full brigade every year. 
Tramp ! Tramp ! Tramp ! Every two weeks a full 
company has come to the ford at the narrow stream 
of death. Tramp ! Tramp ! Every three months we 
find that a full regiment has passed from our sight 
to resting places upon an unseen shore. The four 
regiments of a brigade are mustered there for the 
last roll-call every year. Thus forty regiments in 
ten years — and in twenty years a grand army corps 
of from 80,000 to 100,000 then have passed on from 
sight to join the early martyrs in our country's 
cause. Of army corps there are not many. Soon 
the boys will all have gone. These will have joined 
those — the early "dead upon the field of honor." 

[42] 



LOVE OF COUNTRY 

But memories of their deeds will live until the last 
syllable of recorded time. They leave a memorial 
more enduring than sculptured stone. Their monu- 
ment is a thing of life. It has a continued growth. 
If you would observe it, it is not far to seek. So do 
I now remember that the great fire of London, how- 
ever calamitous in itself, afforded great oppor- 
tunities for the exercises, on a more extended scale, 
of the architectural abilities of Sir Christopher 
Wren. Much of the beauty of rebuilt London lay 
in his brain before it was wrought out in stone. 
Tourists love to visit St. Paul's, where sleeps the 
honored dead. The attending guide draws atten- 
tion to the significant but simple inscription; — "If 
you would see his monument, look around." So I 
would say of the martyr soldier — If you would see 
his monument, look around. Consider our re-united 
nation. Look around ! Contemplate the happy and 
prosperous people. Look around! Reflect what a 
land we have — what a government ! Is it not now 
the cynosure for the weary eyes of the oppressed of 
all other nations? Look around! I think of this as 
I stand among the buildings of our national capital. 
I love to look around and think that this is the seat 
of government for the whole people. Nor can I 
forget this as I see these lines of railway belting 
together the north with such New England states 
and Florida at the south. An inseparable union is 
coming to exist. New sympathies arise. Old ani- 
mosities are being supplanted. We are rising to a 
new glory in our national life. We cannot realize 

[43] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

the true grandeur of the soldiers' monument unless 
we look around. If I compare it with the most 
famous memorials that have hitherto existed to per- 
petuate devotion and heroism among men, we see 
how it stands unapproachable and unapproached. 
Go with me to the heart of the Oberland Alps. We 
are now at lovely Lucerne. Look you across the 
calm and leaf-shadowed pool — upon the precipitous 
rock. There, cut into its flinty side, is the realization 
in stone of Thorwaldsen's great thought — the lion 
of Lucerne. Never was an act of courage more simply 
and yet more grandly illustrated. This memorial com- 
memorates the valor of the Swiss guards who were 
massacred in Paris during the first revolution. They 
were the sentinels about the person of Louis XVI. 
These Swiss troops died not for their country. They 
died only for their sacred oath in the service of him 
whom they had sworn to protect, and yet their devotion 
was worthy of unceasing praise on the part of their 
countrymen. Another epitaph is over the three 
hundred Spartans who fell with Leonidas at Ther- 
mopylae: "Go tell the Lacedemonians that we lie 
here in obedience to their laws." This exemplifies 
another form of devotion; it is obedience to law, 
without which, while we have license, it is not 
possible to have liberty. On Concord Green the 
statue of the soldier of the republic stands at eternal 
"parade rest." Have you ever noted that this 
attitude is always adopted in sculpture as expres- 
sive of man's greatest strength? It is not so well 
displayed in the moment of action as in the strength 

[44] 



LOVE OF COUNTRY 

of repose after successful achievement. Action is 
a matter of review, and it affords the happiest con- 
templation. The lives of martyrs have a purchas- 
ing power. They are counters. Like shillings and 
guineas, they can be given in exchange for some 
things. They are valuable for what they will buy. 
Our Saviour's death! Its value is in its purchasing 
power. We are bought with its price. In one sense 
His sepulchre counts but one among all the broken 
tombs of earth. In a better view, however, His death 
discriminates His grave from all others in what it 
achieved. He gave His life, a ransom for many. So 
with those who redeemed our Union and purchased 
liberty for the captive. We reckon those deaths in 
terms of what was achieved by them. They did not, 
like the Swiss Guard, simply lay down their all in 
defence of the person of a merely earthly monarch. 
Nor was it, like the men of Thermopylae, to conserve 
our laws. It was for an idea. We do not affirm that 
we are better men than the Confederates. To loyal 
men, however, it was given to detect the divine 
presence in history. When others rebelliously and 
stubbornly placed themselves across the path of 
national progress in which the God of our national 
history was evidently moving, men loyal to duty, to 
country, and to the national good, sprang to arms, 
saying: "Prepare ye the way of the Lord;" and the 
pathway was cleared of obstructions, that freedom's 
cause might have its glorious fulfilment when the 
fullness of the time had come. It is easily seen that 
the idea for which you fought is the precise line of 

[45] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

our national development. In the Revolution the 
struggle was upon the basis of the Declaration of 
Independence, that all men are created free and 
equal. As a result of that seven years' conflict this 
was at length conceded. Now you go into the battle 
to determine, by force of arms — it could not other- 
wise be reached — the interpretation of the very 
first line of our American Constitution. They of 
the South held to the heresy of state rights. That 
state that led off the secession voted, believing that 
it was in her power to thus vote, that "the union 
subsisting between South Carolina and other states 
is hereby dissolved.' ' God was moving to the more 
advanced idea of the individuality and personality 
of men. So you, following in His wake, fought 
for interpretation of the first line of the Consti- 
tution. You were determined it should read: "Not 
we, the States," — they are not the units — the 
nation is the unit, composed of individual men, — 
but rather "We, the people of the United States." 
So it stands today, thanks to the American soldier. 
That interpretation is his latest and proudest 
achievement. The idea is now instinct with immor- 
tal life. It shall never perish from the earth. It 
is enshrined in that instrument which stands in 
political history as the noblest product ever thrown 
off by the human mind. It is engraven upon an 
imperishable tablet. And while that idea endures, as 
endure it must, the memory of those who secured its 
perpetuity and determined its interpretation shall 
never perish from the grateful memory of mankind. 

[46] 



IV 
THE NOBLE ART OF HURRAHING 

It is not good form in some circles to be enthu- 
siastic in any interest, no matter how lofty. All 
earnest exhibitions of feeling are suppressed. A 
languid, critical disapproving attitude is assumed 
and held. A habit of thought and expression is 
countenanced in which ardor and a genuine and 
generous emotion and the exuberant spirit are dis- 
placed. Some people even make their lack of en- 
thusiasm a matter of pride. The influence of Carlyle 
and Matthew Arnold and of the Pall Mall Gazette and 
their imitators this side of the sea, the comic papers, 
and the new spirit of criticism in history, literature, 
and life are responsible, at least remotely, for the 
beginnings of the decline of enthusiasm. The 
prophet of protest or the apostle of everything that 
begins with "non" or "in" or "contra" or "anti," 
while he may be effective and while he attracts eager 
listeners, and finds greedy readers, knows nothing 
of the noble art of hurrahing. The man who avoids 
all responsibility for government, and makes a 
microscopic search for faults, becomes a censor, and 
discovers bad motives and evil purposes in every new 
piece of legislation or administration that is 
attempted, lacks the disposition to cheer. "The 
Noble Art of Hurrahing" is dependent on a quality 
called soul. "We cannot but speak," said the 

[47] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

apostles in self-explanation. There was an irre- 
pressible, volcanic power "like burning fire shut up 
in their bones, and they were weary with forbearing, 
and they could not stay." It seeks to find vent. 
There is a store of spiritual vitality, an overflow of 
high spirits, a certain spring to the nature, that 
accounts for our own war Governor John A. Andrew, 
the enthusiast in politics, Agassiz, the enthusiast in 
science, and for Phillips Brooks, the enthusiast for 
humanity. These impassioned men never learned to 
measure themselves by the negations in them. It 
is good to be generously affected always in a good 
thing. Religious teachers who deprecate enthusiasm, 
and exalt what they call a sober standard of feeling, 
which rigidly represses its emotion, will please keep 
in mind that an outburst of loyalty, voiced almost 
rapturously, was among the few things that our 
Saviour unreservedly praised. He knew that 
religion or any other great cause goes down when it 
loses the power of exciting the highest, most intel- 
ligent, and most courageous social enthusiasm. 

Slogans 

The only thing that will overcome the inde- 
scribable feeling of halt in ecclesiastical affairs is a 
rallying-cry, a shibboleth, a slogan, a vitalizing quan- 
tity or personality, that shall start the hearty acclaim. 
It throws off the chill. It inspires a new crusade. 
It is born of hope and joy and spontaneous glad- 
ness. It always marks the farthest advance in man- 
kind. This irrepressible, volcanic action is not manu- 

[48] 



THE NOBLE ART OF HURRAHING 

factured, as men of weak passions are inclined 
to assume. It is the irresistible overflow of full 
hearts; and if, on occasion, these should hold their 
peace, the stone would cry out of the wall and the 
beam out of the timber would answer it. 

Where youth is still found that shouts, 
"Hosanna," and faith that is unmixed with doubt, 
we discover an impulse to be heedless of self and to 
enter with banners even a contested field. Thus 
Gordon Granger's reserve corps appeared without 
orders upon the battle field of Chickamauga. They 
heard the distant cannonade, the uproar of battle, 
sounding nearer and nearer; and, animated by the 
loftiest patriotism, they rose to a double-quick, threw 
themselves into the thick of the fight, and by one 
impetuous, irresistible charge rolled back their 
enemies, and turned defeat into victory under condi- 
tions which English strategists had called impossible. 
That was a good prayer of the brother, in meeting, 
that we might be raised above the need of any local 
or special pressure to duty, that our steadfast 
pressure might be ever from within. "You seem to 
have the faculty, sir/' said Washington to Putnam, 
"of infusing your own spirit." 

One believes almost in the doctrine of the trans- 
migration of the soul when he witnesses the power 
of one earnest and enthusiastic nature to impart 
itself to others. When Marcus Aurelius enumerates 
in his " Meditations' ' the forces which had entered 
into the formation of his character, the entire list 
consists of the names of persons. No mention is 

[49] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

made of rules or maxims, of literature or philosophy, 
although the emperor and philosopher was a devotee 
of both. To be able to admire noble qualities in 
others is evidence of a kinship of mind to them. Let 
us test ourselves. Is there any one now living in 
whose presence and at the mention of whose name 
we would like to propose a cheer, or would you want 
first to make over the heroes somewhat, change their 
style and methods, and tone down the matter of their 
utterances ? If no one lives for whom we can hurrah, 
it may be a lack, not of the hero, but in the appre- 
ciation of him. 

Enthusiasm is not a matter of temperament. It 
is a duty. Every person ought to be proud of some- 
thing and bear it like a plume. Any one can have 
the noble art of hurrahing, provided he will let go 
of himself, and find his joy in espousing a noble 
cause, and yield himself entirely to it with an 
unselfish abandon. 

He ought, for example, to hurrah for his college. 
It has been to him the bright particular star, if not 
the central sun, in the system of sister schools. We 
do not say that the college is perfect; but for him, 
at least, it is the best there is. What a lesson is 
given in the noble art of hurrahing at the commence- 
ment banquet, when in moments of inspiration, 
self-deliverance, and victory a man will rise and say, 
"I sing the college," and so is emptied and lost and 
swallowed up unselfishly in an object that he would 
rather applaud and magnify than to impress the com- 
pany with his own importance! It is an education 

[50] 



THE NOBLE ART OF HURRAHING 

to a selfish man and egoist to be pulled down with, 
the shouts, "Talk about the college. Hurrah for 
Alma Mater. Ring the changes on the college. It's 
the cause, the cause." 

The loyal, cheering alumnus is lifted above him- 
self. He gets out of himself, and lives for a moment 
a sublime life. He is elevated into heroism and 
sacrifice. He rises into the spirit of the college yell. 
"Hail to a college that in 1862 held back from her 
country's service no one male student who was fit 
by his years for military duty !" 

In this rapturous attachment to persons, places, 
ideas and programs, like the heart of David to 
Zion, how unhallowed appears the cynical spirit, 
which is one form of conceit, where the critic, hang- 
ing by the nails and teeth on the edge of things, is 
threatening to drop off and to take some dirt with 
him unless affairs are conducted to suit him. A great 
deterrent to hurrahing is what is sometimes termed, 
let us hope unjustly, "Harvard indifference." It 
was not from their forefathers that the collegians 
in our foremost seat of learning inherited this poor 
quality if they have it. "I do not love a man," says 
Goldsmith, "who is zealous of nothing." 

It is said in print that President Gilman was so 
much impressed during his Yale career with the 
severity with which enthusiasm was repressed by 
insisting that it was foolish for young men to become 
authors before they had anything to say, that he 
determined, on assuming the charge of John Hopkins 
University, to put the young men of that institution 

[5i] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

to active literary service as soon as they had been 
trained sufficiently to do it well; and its lead in 
political and historical writing, and a large part of 
its present educational power, are to be traced to 
the literary work which its alumni have already pro- 
duced. These young graduates have even now 
acquired world-wide fame by their writings. 

Support Your Team 

Defeat in an athletic contest with a rival insti- 
tution has just been attributed by the college paper 
to the lack of support which the spectators gave the 
home team. If their errors are to be greeted with 
groans, ought not a good play to be recognized, the 
paper feelingly pleads by some other form of appre- 
ciation than the mean inquiry as to how it happened? 
It seems, then, that the Society of Encouragers, in 
the view of students, divides the responsibility with 
the players. 

There can be no happier function in life than 
to so act upon people that they think their best, 
speak their best, and do their best. High-born, noble 
souls are singularly dependent upon the approba- 
tion of their fellow men. There is such a thing as 
cruel, culpable, pernicious silence. "Approve things 
that are excellent/' are words in an epistle written 
by an apostle. I have seen the great cloud of wit- 
nesses on the bleachers put the life right into a game 
by the noble art of hurrahing. So was it with the 
sad-voiced, disappointed, dejected minister who had 
preached in vacant pulpits, on occasion, as supply for 

[52] 



THE NOBLE ART OF HURRAHING 

many years, as pictured by Mr. Crockett, until he 
received the stimulus of an encouraging word from a 
good Scotch elder named "William Greig, when he 
pulled himself together on the following Sunday, 
and preached so stormily that he took the congrega- 
tion by assault, and got a unanimous call on the 
spot. 

I like to see a man capable of taking fire — 
taking fire — taking it from some other source outside 
of himself. Col. J. G. B. Adams, who was held in 
such high admiration and esteem by his comrades, 
a very beau ideal of soldier spirit, in a public address 
found that the fuse was damp or something, and had 
the frankness to stop and say, "Boys, I think I can 
go along all right if you will give me a cheer. ' ' They 
gave him a lift, and he in turn electrified his audi- 
ence. 

Everybody who has the finer feelings and who 
is good for anything is singularly dependent on the 
art which we are seeking to commend. When Dar- 
win received a word of praise from Sir John 
Mclntire, he says, it made a new being of him. His 
latent faculties were then called up. This faculty 
of evoking the best in another is in its way a kind 
of genius. Go into a large library, stand in the 
alcove of biography, glance into books at random — 
Lincoln, Spurgeon, Benjamin West, statesmen, 
preachers, artists, an uncounted catalogue ; and note 
their uniform indebtedness to the first who cheered. 
They seem to wait for the word of approbation ; and, 

[S3] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

when this has been granted, they rise to meet the 
public expectation. 

For the Mechanics' Hall in Boston seven thou- 
sand tickets had been sold in advance, and not a seat 
on floor or in galleries and not an inch of standing- 
room remained unoccupied in the aisles, up to the 
orchestra rails. Just after a solo by Mrs. Barry, a 
little spark of fire was seen upon the red cloth side 
of the proscenium. Several men jumped up ex- 
citedly and pointed to the little glimmer. In an 
instant the attention of the whole vast audience was 
centered upon that one spot. Even as they looked 
the little flame glided up the side, creeping with 
startling rapidity along the edge of the fabric. As 
the audience viewed the scene with subdued terror, 
a lithe form was noticed approaching. It was sub- 
stitute Victor, of Engine 22, who with a companion 
was on duty in the hall. He hesitated for a moment. 
But men cheered and ladies joined with them, while 
handkerchiefs and hats were waved in all parts of 
the great building. Hesitancy instantly vanished. 
Quickly climbing up the slender framework, hand 
over hand, and swinging from cross-bar to cross-bar, 
he seized the cloth, and, tearing it loose, dropped it 
down where it was grasped by others and the blaze 
extinguished. Electrified by this noble art of hur- 
rahing, he became a hero. With the sympathetic 
support of a myriad of souls he seemed to use a 
strength beyond his own. Having received a cheer, 
a man cannot turn back. 



[54] 



V 
BEING AT ONE'S BEST 

When a physician takes a patient's temperature, 
he places a little sensitive instrument under the tongue 
or arm. It is called a clinical thermometer. It looks 
as if it had in it a tiny bit of steel wire that is pushed 
along up before the column of mercury, and is left at 
the highest point to which it advances. The greatest 
height that is attained by the river Nile in its periodi- 
cal flood is measured and recorded by a Nilometer. 

When the heart is lifted up and the emotions at- 
tain uncommon elevation, they are in certain ways 
self-registering. The spirit voices itself in holy re- 
solve, sometimes in a vow. When we are conscious of 
an ebbtide sort of feeling, and we are far from our 
best, we wonder that we ever expressed ourselves as 
the record seems to prove. 

The soul has its illuminated moments. At times 
it glows with a white heat. Each person has his red- 
letter days, and it is a fine wish for him that his best 
days last year may be his poorest days in the year to 
come. Men like St. Paul are sometimes caught up 
out of themselves. They rise to levels not ordinarily 
reached. These are moments of power. Men are 
lifted often into a high mood which changes their 
whole life. 

On that ever-memorable night in which Julius 
Caesar resolved to take the decisive step which would 

[55] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

bring him to the front as the foremost man in the 
foremost nation of the world, and establish an empire 
that would last a thousand and half a thousand years 
his mighty soul was greatly agitated. The uttermost 
depths of his being were broken up. So profoundly 
was he moved that he gave an entertainment to his 
officers to divert their attention, that they might not 
observe how his strong spirit was staggered. The 
whole course of future history and the fate of every 
nation are affected by his decision. 

About him were darkness, hesitancy, confusion, 
and within him unutterable struggle, intense anxiety, 
and tempest. He was living as satrap in a province, 
and to cross a little stream that divided Italy from 
Cisalpine Gaul was an outward token of an intention 
to undertake an enterprise from which he cannot 
recede and from which he is determined not to recede. 

Destiny is poised upon a pivot. There are radiant, 
priceless instants when they that are awake behold the 
glory. In minutes like these the clock strikes. This is 
the hour of vision. The rest of life is given only to 
the involved details. Many a career is the free gift of a 
happy moment. At this juncture the man's second 
sight discerned a portent. It said, ' ' Come ! " He was 
not disobedient to the vision. The world wears its 
effects to this present year of grace. There is a spirit 
in man, and the inspiring of it giveth him under- 
standing. 

St. Paul saw a man of Macedonia who said, 
"Come." If on taking the journeys he had inquired 
for the man that uttered this invitation, he could not 

[56] 



BEING AT ONE'S BEST 

have been found, as his existence was in the apostle's 
inspired exaltation of soul. Visions like Paul's come 
only to men who are passionately religious, but to 
such they are events of destiny. John Bunyan's pil- 
grim believes in what he sees from the mountain. 
When in less favored days he cannot quite discern the 
Celestial City, he keeps his course, for in his best 
hours he obtained the right direction. As Jacob went 
on his way, the angels of God met him. 

There is a passage in the life of Samuel J. Mills 
that suggests almost a like experience. As he was 
walking on the way to school, his mother, as he knew, 
having retired to her room to pray for him, not to 
rise from her knees until she was assured her prayer 
for her son was heard, the angels of G-od met him. 
' ' Just as I turned the corner the gentle drawing came 
on." It was a time of great exaltation of feeling. 
Every month and every week of his impassioned life 
up to his burial at sea received a dash of color from 
that crucial era. It makes us think of little Samuel 
listening for the first time to the voice of God. 

Others since have heard a voice they did not 
know, but after that high experience a greater and 
better world has become credible and real. There are 
sublime seasons when we drink of the rivers of God's 
pleasures, and luminous seasons when as in Wales, in 
Los Angeles, and Denver, all unannounced God comes 
to town. There are periods of awakening, of spiritual 
insight and uplift, of aspiration when a new plane of 
life is permanently established. There are tides of 
the soul. If they recede, they also flood. 

[57] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

"All night the thirsty beach has listening lain 

With patience dumb, 
Counting the slow, sad moments of her pain; 

Now morn has come, 
And with the morn the punctual tide again.* ? 

Sometimes a man, like a century-plant, seems to 
have lived for the sake of one day. Mrs. Adams could 
not say, "Now to-morrow I will write, ' Nearer, my 
God, to Thee/ " which will never be outsung, and 
which carries the human faculty up to the highest 
point of which we have any distinct knowledge. 
There are undulations of the spirit. Genius seems 
always to travel an uneven road. How shall we ex- 
plain the coming of a day absolutely unheralded when 
Ray Palmer blossoms with "My faith looks up to 
Thee/' when General Oliver composes "Federal 
Street, ' ' w T hen Robinson Crusoe discovers a sail within 
the horizon, or when Millet sets out the divine "An- 
gelus?" An orator one day is like Naphtali, as "a 
hind let loose," and another day he is shut up and 
cannot come forth. The mood is always more im- 
portant than the mode. 

If a man has abundant life, the plainer, like the 
ocean, is the exhibit of its ebb and flood. Sometimes 
he is in the Spirit on the Lord's day. The Saviour 
had an hour in which he exclaimed, ' ' Father, I thank 
thee," and one in which he said, "My soul is ex- 
ceeding sorrowful even unto death." David could 
say, ' ' He hath put a new song in my mouth, ' ' but 
again, "All thy waves and thy billows are gone over 
me." In probably the finest analysis ever made of 

[58] 



BEING AT ONE'S BEST 

Mr. Beecher's mind, attention is drawn to its periodic- 
ity. On recurring Sunday mornings nothing less was 
expected of him than he should electrify an audi- 
ence. This was bound to occur at almost fixed 
intervals. Water will pile up a mass, and concentrate 
force and energy, and the evidence of it chiefly ap- 
pears when it bursts forth in torrents. 

The occasionalism of one's best mood and highest 
power is a sign, not of poverty, nor of weakness of 
spirit, but of grandeur and of noble attainment. For 
a few years a record has been kept of the number of 
times that newspapers and hearers have given heartiest 
acclaim to our princeliest orators by using the ex- 
pression, "They were at their best." A notoriously 
dull preacher is never thus described. 

The lamented George D. Robinson, who attained 
such celebrity as governor of Massachusetts, sprang 
suddenly also into surprising eminence in the practice 
of law, in which he was repeatedly pitted against the 
recognized leaders of the bar. Men were like clay in 
his hands. His distinction seemed to inhere in this: 
he was always at his best. This was said of him in 
every appearance he made in his long contest with 
Governor Butler. There is an ill-defined fascination 
about such an orator. He carries an atmosphere. He 
takes hearts captive. 

Such inspirations must have some form of ante- 
cedent preparation. It usually presumes an earlier 
drudgery. A flame must feed on something. We 
sometimes say of a man that he is very reserved. He 
seems to be holding back his best, and keeping all of 

[59] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

his personality to himself. It is hard to know him; 
and, if he is a good man and full of ideas and of fine 
feeling, this is a distinct loss. He might even give his 
ideas to others, but not himself. He impresses you as 
a person out of whom more ought to have been made. 

But here was a talented governor of large per- 
sonality, having not only that high reserve that 
belongs to noble minds, but also such sympathetic rela- 
tions with others and that full expression of his 
strength, that on occasion caused a magnetic current 
to be immediately set up, by which he gave an audi- 
ence his best, always awaking a response ; and they in 
turn gave him back new elevation of feeling and 
courage and power. Being keyed up to high pitch 
when a note was struck, it raised answering vibrations, 
and the interplay between him and his audience was 
like that of wireless telegraphy. No amount of simu- 
lated animation or enthusiasm could secure these mag- 
netic effects. 

Men like him who have succeeded in life have not 
always been able to point to great opportunities. 
All that ever came to him was wide open to others. 
He began by teaching school, and the teacher made the 
school. 

This ability to be at one's best means hard work. 
It also means seasons of germination. Before a mind 
is roused it ought to be filled with strong ideas. It 
distinctly means that one must at the time be at the 
top of his physical condition. A man must be his 
best before he can do his best. It is all implied 

[60] 






BEING AT ONE'S BEST 

when you say of a man that it is in him to make a 
good salesman or orator. 

Take notice of the words "in him." It is there. 
Stir up the gift that is in thee. You may know that 
you are in your right work when it fits you. A man 
is at his best when in an appropriate field he can 
project his individuality and use his invention. This 
string is then divinely played upon. "What use would 
it be to try to make a lawyer or a business man out of 
an Audubon or Agassiz or Robert Burns? William 
Cowper could not do the work of William Carey, nor 
John Milton that of John Bunyan. The natural bent 
is very strong. To naturally "lean that way" augurs 
better for success than that most fallacious and even 
sometimes harmful thing which for young men is 
called "an opening." 

There are often found in a theological seminary 
a few young men who are, as it is said, willing to go 
abroad as missionaries. Now mere willingness is no 
more a qualification to be a missionary than willing- 
ness to be a general. Men are willing to be great who 
to-day take their businesss by the blade, and not by 
the handle. 

One of the finest instances of selection was the 
appointment of David Livingstone as a missionary to 
Africa. God had chosen him. His career makes one 
believe in a doctrine of election. The Lord has not 
repeated himself in creating men. Every mind has its 
special capacity. Each man is born with a certain 
bias. There is some particular thing he can do better 
than he can do anything else. A man will be at his 

[61] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

best in a calling when he enters not because of position 
and salary, but because it attracts him as a valley at- 
tracts a river, when he moves inevitably toward the 
result, and when he has pleasure in his work. Shake- 
speare 's works are rightly called plays. They came 
so spontaneously that he did not even sign his name 
to them. Lord Bacon would never have let Hamlet 
go anonymous into the world. 

When St. Paul, at an exigency in his experience, 
is accorded liberty to speak for himself, and begins, 
' i I think myself happy, King Agrippa, ' ' it is enough. 
You will hear him at his best. It will be an event. 
The mood is right, the audience just right ; everything 
is as he would have it. There is something in the at- 
mosphere that makes Paul feel that now he can let 
himself out. 

A man is likeliest to be at his best when his work 
is done with an air of cheerfulness and performed 
with a sort of personal joy. Where work is done in 
this spirit, no profession is crowded. Happy is the 
man who finds his task. "Give- us, 0, give us, the 
man who sings at his work. He will do more in the 
same time, he will do it better, he will persevere 
longer. ' ' A man cannot be at his best who is in bond- 
age to his employment, * i Beyond his chain he cannot 
go." 

When does a man have his photograph taken ? It 
is not immediately after a chill. In what attitude do 
we desire to leave the more permanent record of our- 
selves? One of the delightful things about Dr. 
Holmes was his "delicate enjoyment of himself. " He 

[62] 



BEING AT ONE'S BEST 

treated himself as a third person who to him was 
interesting. If a man is to have a delicate enjoyment 
of himself, it ought to be chiefly when he is at his 
best, when in moments of exalted feeling, in general 
elevation of spirit, when mind and heart are in 
powerful action. 

In his most celebrated effort Dr. Nott, in giving 
that eloquent eulogy of Alexander Hamilton, who 
fought the duel with Aaron Burr, exclaimed, "It was 
a moment in which Hamilton was not himself." A 
man does not always live up to the best there is in 
him. Simon Peter had his weak hours; so did Esau 
when everything in him was relaxed, his body was 
exhausted, his mind flagged, his courage had faded. 
' ' If anything should ever separate us, you must think 
of me at my best," said Steerforth to David Copper- 
field. Standing on the shore of the Mississippi, one 
can often see a stretch of sandy strand showing that 
sometimes the river is fuller than at others. It is a 
symbol of life. 

When does a man say to himself, ' i That is you ? ' ' 
When he is at his best or when he is in his weak 
hours ? It lifts the general average of life if he makes 
the most of his best mood, lives in the light of it, 
remembers it, and carries into all his prosier days the 
enthusiasms of it. A man ought to be just to his best 
heart, and to measure himself, and to have faith in 
what he thinks when he is at his brightest and best. 
"The best man is man at the best." Every one has 
some strong point, and the manliest man is the man 
who is thoroughly himself when his qualities have 

[63] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

come to their best flower. Let no one of us think that 
he has no best; for, if his special aptitudes are once 
summoned, it will be proved that he has a best which 
individualizes him. 

One of the finest possible correctives to a person 
is to ask himself as he approaches his desk at school, 
or his study-table at home, or as he takes up difficult 
duty or discipline, or attempts to meet high public 
expectation, "Am I now at my best?" If not, why 
not? No man is at his best if some unforgiven sin 
lieth crouching at the door. 

We read of Jesus that He returned in the power 
of the Spirit. There is a divine increment that will 
sometimes give an intense sympathy with others, an 
infectious enthusiasm, a more magnetic humanity, and 
an unspeakable yet indefinable augment of strength. 
John the Baptist was a prophet ; yet Jesus said of him 
that he was "more than" a prophet. Now it is in that 
"more than" that lay the whole hiding of his power. 
That was the element that imparted the force. Some 
religious men know by conscious experience what that 
complement is. Some one has wisely pointed out that 
the world will be brightened not by extraordinary 
men, but by ordinary men with extraordinary power. 

To occasionally raise the question, "Am I now at 
my best?" as one comes to his most intense study- 
hour will disclose to him some of the sins of appetite, 
the sin of the misuse of late evening hours and heinous 
transgression of the fixed laws of good health. 

A review of personal history seems to reveal that 
great opportunities come unawares, and on their ap- 

[«4] 



BEING AT ONE'S BEST 

proach are invariably disguised in Immble garb. It 
cannot be questioned but doors of opportunity, 
chances of gain and emolument, openings to position 
and reputation, have been unessayed by many a man 
because when for him the clock of destiny struck he 
was not at his best, and did not discern them nor see 
their import. Only in luminous moments, in high 
moods, when the mind seems to perceive things intui- 
tively, is the faculty of vision clarified. 

If with a conscious feeling that something was 
expected of him each person should first make a study, 
and then an effort to be more often, then, if possible, 
more continuously, at his best, what a general per- 
pendicular lift would be given to the race and to the 
world ! A new earth would almost be in sight if each 
individual, to make it better, would attend, although 
incidentally to his work for others, to his own better- 
ment. 

Being at your best, on what do you lavish your 
best? Everybody has some object or person, himself 
or another, on which he lavishes his choicest endow- 
ment. We know where the alabaster box was broken. 
It is a gift of the best that touches the heart. Abra- 
ham brought Isaac to the altar, his best. Being at our 
best, but what for? There is nothing too good for 
friendship, nothing too good for the church or the 
college, and nothing too good to apply to young men 
and women who are in the formative stage of their 
lives. 



[65] 



VI 
THE NEW FORUM AND THE OLD LYCEUM 

The happiest set of people that I have lately seen 
was in a Sunday evening forum. The atmosphere 
was like that of a reunion of friends. In token of 
sympathy and approval a ripple of applause broke 
out upon the silence at the conclusion of the prayer. 
On this evening the clock never loiters on its way 
to ten, and when its two hands are together there, 
the leader comes to the edge of the platform, and 
after a moment's pause, in token of the prevailing 
good feeling, dismisses the large company with the 
words "Good night," which are taken up in remote 
parts of the house, "Good night," "Good night," 
"Good night." A chairman for a forum is born, 
not made. He gives the boat a good push from the 
shore and then takes the tiller. A misfit here is fatal. 
He has generalship, a gift which nature sometimes 
plenteously bestows, but more often withholds. He 
is a person having both force and friends. He knows 
the front door to the human heart. He sounds the 
dominant note, gives the key, elevates the feeling, 
excites expectation, like Julius Caesar is "in the 
midst of things," controls the situation and projects 
his individuality. No leader, no forum : — this is fact 
number one. Followers soon take on the traits of a 
leader of ability and distinction. When you know 

[66] 



THE NEW FORUM AND THE OLD LYCEUM 

a captain you see his company; a regiment is the 
counterpart of its colonel; an army will take vital 
character from a Nathaniel Greene, a Stuart, or a 
Sheridan. The maker's name is on the handle. A 
forum is not merely an audience, it is a spirit. Its 
pet aversion is dullness. Ancestral worship, which 
once brought to the Chinese a form of national 
paralysis, does not fit a forum's needs. "Wit and en- 
tertainment are not here given the place that was 
accorded them in the old lyceum. The mood and 
atmosphere are different. Anything academic, 
merely historical or cultural or exegetical, of what 
Jefferson said, or Hamilton meant, or Edwards 
taught, is more welcome elsewhere. The speaker 
must have a message — this is fact number two. 

Keeps the Middle of the Road 
A stump speech is never heard. None of the 
fiery soapbox orators of the street corners are per- 
mitted to harangue the audience. Use is made only 
of crowned and recognized talent. There are no 
risks, no seconds, no maiden efforts. Nothing is 
amateurish. A boy who saw crepe on a door said 
there must be "deadness" in the family. So far 
from this, a forum instead of sending all zealots to 
the rear, brings to the front all the enthusiasts who 
feel and care and who give life and force to a 
movement, provided strictly that they strive law- 
fully and play according to the rules of the game. 
What shall be done with meg. who adhere to their 
little beliefs and obstinacies very much as the China- 

[67] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

man carries his little joss to every corner of the 
earth and as Rachael had her sacred images always 
by the tent as she journeyed? These men are like 
the ancient mariner who must declare his woe. A 
man who has the measles is in an unpropitious con- 
dition unless they "come out." The patient is 
watched until the thing with which he is afflicted 
shows itself on the surface. So with a man obsessed 
with an idea; when he states it, it becomes objective 
to him and he sees it reflected at different angles. 
A faddist, in a rut, follows only a furrow, where a 
little cross plowing, the very thing that the question 
hour supplies, is needed. Stop an intelligent citizen 
on the street and ask him what he supposes to be 
the essentials of a forum and he will probably say 
an accessible place of meeting on neutral ground, 
rather free from ecclesiastical staidness and asso- 
ciation, a master of assemblies for leader, and a large 
cosmopolitan community in which are many indi- 
viduals with certain ideals touching Americanism, 
particularly democracy. Not so ! Your man does 
not stand quite high enough to get a sidewise look 
at a forum. The secret of all success is inherent in 
this: The members must be made to feel interested 
in each other — this is fact number three. At this 
all the leaders aim in the Hungry Club, of Pitts- 
burgh ; in the Sunday Evening Club, of Chicago ; and 
in such sample forums as are found at Houston, 
Texas; Manchester, New Hampshire; Melrose, 
Massachusetts; Toledo, Ohio; Kansas City, Mo.; and 
Bellows Falls, Vermont. 

[68] 



THE NEW FORUM AKD THE OLD LYCEUM 

Not the Cave of Adullam 
Men are not like ships that pass in the night. 
Detached persons cannot make a nucleus for a Sun- 
day evening forum. A man thought to gain a swarm 
of bees by catching them, as he had opportunity, 
one by one. But individuals do not make a hive; 
they have no relationship, no bond of unity or 
existence. They must have a queen, a form of 
co-operation, and together become a colony and be 
an entity. They must first create a union before 
they can develop esprit de corps. While a principle 
like this has always been true, its practical working 
is doubly obvious during these last few years of 
social revival. One motive for attendance is fellow- 
ship, one and another going because some others go, 
who are a lodestone. Now, just as a person who 
would study colonial architecture turns to the John 
Hancock house in Boston, or to the Nichols and 
Cook-Oliver residences in the older settlement of 
Salem, so to enjoy a forum one can best observe the 
great prototype on some Sunday night in Ford Hall, 
a tall, stately building, having the semblance of a 
bank and standing adjacent to the State House in 
Boston. Here is the central sun, whose brightness 
gloriously appears, amid diverse conditions, in 
nearly two hundred reflected lights. The Ford Hall 
Forum is not a sort of home for the friendless and 
the socially non-elect. It represents a serried array 
of white-collared men. George W. Coleman, alert, 
magnetic, giving the impression of vigor, vitality, 
and sincerity, also of having forces that he has no 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

expectation of using, rises and opens the meeting 
with the calmness and precision of a man of affairs 
and of a member of the Boston City Council. Here 
is the modern St. George, who sets forth to destroy 
a mighty dragon that menaces the life of the com- 
mon people. His promptness and his fairness, and 
his facility and felicity in making the articulations 
of the service are manifest. At evary point he 
seeks to advance the thought and the good feeling 
of the occasion. On ascending the platform some 
chairmen begin to reach for a small mallet to begin 
a clatter. He makes no use of the gavel. He does 
not put his audience under the ferule like school 
children. He does not come to them with a rod. 
He requires no insignia of his authority. He is more 
inspirational, creative, and constructive than the 
presiding officer of the old lyceum, the pride and 
boast of every community, in its halcyon days ever 
became. In the old lyceum at the last it grew to be a 
custom not to introduce well-known, well-advertised 
speakers, excepting chiefly John B. Gough, whose 
popularity outlasted that of all his contemporaries, 
and 'whose early obsession was a mild form of stage 
fright, causing him to insist upon being introduced 
in order to give him a moment to get hold of him- 
self and to take the measure of his audience. 

Back to Sunday Night 

If a tendency exists to abandon the Sunday- 
night meeting I am against it. There is but one 
great vital question before the Christians today and 

[70] 



THE NEW FORUM AND THE OLD LYCEUM 

that is : what shall we do with our Sabbath evenings? 
Ford Hall always expects to be full. The doors 
separate a large inspiring company into two parts, 
as those without often equal those within. In the 
old lyceum at Salem, as the great hall was not large 
enough for the audience, the lecture given on Tues- 
day night was repeated on Wednesday evening. The 
orthodox formed the habit of coming together Tues- 
day night and the Unitarians attended on Wednes- 
day evening. But in the street in front of Ford Hall 
the overflow stands in close formation and is called 
the " bread line." This feature did not escape the 
all-seeing eye of the press, and the newspapers have 
become the forum's best ally: "Standing room 
only;" "Hall foil;" "Oh, let us in though late!" 
"Too late, too late, ye cannot enter now." Thus 
tarries outside, at times, a sort of reserve audience, 
anxious to be present in the second hour when the 
speaker is plied with questions. Lectures at Chau- 
tauquas and before women's clubs do not furnish 
this electrifying reaction. At the end of the first 
period, when some of the commuters must drop out 
to reach their trains, all those who have waited 
patiently fill up the empty spaces. "Sometimes," 
once remarked an intelligent Japanese, "we express 
our feelings in Japan — opinions we have none." 
It is different in a forum. It is often conjectured 
that the question hour will be monopolized by the 
prophet of protest, who would want a different picture 
thrown upon the canvas before the eyes of the com- 
pany. Such is not the event. The question in every 

[7i] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

ease is taken up and repeated by the director of the 
meeting, who limits each person to one question, thus 
admitting no surplus discussion and scattering any 
running fire. The chairman designates the section of 
the house from which the question may come. 
"Tonight we will begin with the gallery on my 
right." Thus many ideas are advanced before the 
heat that exists in spots is reached, and then it is 
but a step across. Wherever there is a big immi- 
gration a forum should exist. It does for those 
coming to America just what the old lyceum did for 
those who had earlier reached these shores. 

The Years Have Passed — There Remains a Memory 

In the old lyceum the question was addressed 
by the listener directly to the lecturer. Not until 
1826, twenty years after the lyceum was introduced 
into this country, was there an interchange of lec- 
turers at Millbury, Massachusetts. Not one rod of 
railroad existed for their use. The country towns 
were themselves social centers, not having been 
drained into the cities, nor impaired to meet the 
demands of manufacturing centers. The commu- 
nities were isolated and each had to furnish its own 
light and entertainment. In the lyceum at Salem, 
from 1830 to 1845, native Salemites delivered 127 of 
all the lectures. The most intelligent and ingenious 
members of the community supplied the home talent. 
Individuals who had completely mastered some 
subject and could speak upon it with generally rec- 
ognized authority met all public expectations, and, 

[72] 



THE NEW FORUM AKD THE OLD LYCEUM 

at the close of an address, any man like Mr. Holman, 
the universal objector, had more swing than the 
forum affords, as members of the lyceum could ask 
the lecturer to make certain points more obvious, 
and thus arose the questionnaire. During this period 
maps, specimens, apparatus, and products were 
often exhibited. When Essex County, Massachu- 
setts, had twenty-six towns, it had twenty-three 
lyceums supported respectively almost wholly by 
their own townsmen. Women had not then come to 
their own. A lady could not in early days buy a 
ticket of admission to the Salem Lyceum, which had 
853 lectures in its first fifty years, unless introduced 
by a gentleman. Anna E. Dickinson, the oratorical 
Joan of Arc, with her far-famed invective, had not 
then changed the vote of Vermont and been 
reckoned in lyceum circles with the great trium- 
virate, Gough, Beecher, and Phillips, as one of the 
"Big Four." There were thirty lyceums in Boston 
alone. In his town Emerson lectured ninety-eight 
times, and Thoreau nineteen times, and all without 
pay. Concord's lyceum, being one of the first, 
projected 784 lectures, 105 debates, and 14 concerts, 
the last of these being in 1870. The woman's club 
in many communities is rapidly becoming substan- 
tially a lyceum course. This is not only suggestive, 
it is ominous. It was not dependent originally on 
importations of talent. The interest that was felt 
and developed was in one another. The entertain- 
ment came up out of the life of the members. Many 
of the lectures now given would be enjoyed by mere 

[73] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

men. The clubs are too large to meet in a home. To 
go into a hall means lectures. When in cities a 
woman's club house is obtained — the unique social 
purpose of the organization is restored. The 
original Chautauqua idea stood for courses of study, 
textbooks, and, in part, education at home. But we 
find here, as in all evolution, a reversion to type, 
and in many of the widely scattered Chautauquas 
the lyceum idea in the ascendent with lecturers and 
others so slated as to make the circuit. 

Carried to the Zenith of Another Glory 

The forum has the very proper rule that the 
speaker must steer clear of the Scylla and Charybdis 
of both religious and political contentions. This rule 
was affected by the old lyceum, and all volcanic 
subjects were interdicted. It was observed for 
nearly 'thirty years, but in the late fifties the great 
apostles of reform conferred not with flesh and 
blood. It may be doubted if that galaxy that gave 
the lyceum its unexampled prosperity and bril- 
liancy would ever have attained such glory had they 
trimmed and counted their lives dear unto them- 
selves. They were denied the newspapers ; not until 
1856 were lyceum lectures adequately reported. 
This gave the early lecturers occasion to carry their 
messages to different communities instead of having 
the newspaper, after their first efforts, do the work 
for them once for all. There are, however, thou- 
sands of topics used in the new forum and in the 
old lyceum which, if shaken together in a hat, could 

[74] 



THE NEW FORUM AND THE OLD LYCEUM 

not be redistributed into the two classes except as 
guided by a certain dignity and demureness detected 
in the statement of those which were used in the 
old lyceum. Tailors use the same cloth and the 
same sewing, but the difference in garments is in 
the cut. 

Gentlemen of the old school stand revealed by 
such lyceum themes as these : ' ' Traits of the Times, ' ' 
"Alleged Uncertainty of Law," "The Mutual Re- 
lations and Influences of the Various Occupations 
of Life," "Phariseeism," "Injustice of History to 
the Common People," "Have We a Bourbon among 
Us?" "Sectional Prejudices." The educational and 
cultural benefits of the old lyceum are beyond esti- 
mation. 

Reflex Influence of Lyceum Oratory 

One could not travel through Massachusetts 
forty years ago without detecting its spirit. It had 
its survival in the real eloquence that was often let 
loose in the town meeting. A considerable portion 
of the school boy's education was early devoted to 
public declamation. The end of the term in school 
and academy was given to an "exhibition" of it. 
Oratory suited the public taste. Lyceum Hall, 
Lynn's ancient forum, standing at the corner of 
Market and Summer streets on the present site of 
Odd Fellows Hall, rang with free-soil and anti-slavery 
eloquence. All paths led to it. The people crowded 
its gates. No small amount of history can be traced 
to it. When a man is working for a reform he 

[75] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

instinctively tries to get at the ear; the eye gate is 
second choice. It may be the agitator is so called 
because he so loved to agitate the atmosphere. He 
is in accord with the eminent Dr. Rush, who said: 
"The perfection of the ear as an avenue to knowl- 
edge is not sufficiently known. Ideas acquired 
through that organ are much more durable than 
those acquired by the eye." The lyceum germ found 
then a fertile soil. But as our death flies to us with 
our own feathers, so what was best in the old lyceum 
became its undoing. When the business instinct 
usurped its management the lecture was stand- 
ardized. Its talent, its popularity, its effectiveness 
were capitalized. For each of his first lectures 
John B. Gough averaged less than a dollar. His first 
established fee was eight dollars. "Let me handle 
this thing," said the bureau, "and it will be a good 
thing for us both." Mr. Beecher for one lecture 
was paid a thousand dollars. His biographer states 
that not less than a million dollars were received by 
him for his public services. In the years 1874-87 he 
delivered more than twelve hundred lectures. The 
lecture became profitable, not only to the topliners, 
but to the managers. That title, "Star Course," is 
full of sad suggestions. Most money was made on 
star speakers, who eliminated the element of uncer- 
tainty, and so things narrowed and centered into a 
star course. Henry M. Stanley, having found Liv- 
ingstone, earned $287,070 with 110 lectures. Other 
attractions paled before it. The expense became 
enormous and prohibitive, involving a risk and to all 

[76] 



THE NEW FORUM AND THE OLD LYCEUM 

managers a burden which neither our fathers nor we 
were able to bear. A general reliance was placed 
on John B. Gough to make up what was lost on 
other speakers. 

Regard for the Loaves and Fishes 

The lyceum now went, not with the lecture 
end, but with the business end, foremost. When the 
parsonage needed to be repaired, or the church 
painted or the chapel required a piano, a lecture 
course was plotted to which tickets were not bought 
but to which tickets were sold by an active every- 
member canvass. The first one hundred dollars ever 
paid for a lecture was given to Daniel Webster by 
the lyceum in Salem. But the honorarium was not 
wages, nor was it thought of or handed out as 
such. It was a personal tribute like the gift of a 
silver set, after one of his speeches, from Amos 
Lawrence. Neither the hundred dollars, nor the 
silver set stand to the orator's credit in the estima- 
tion of his biographers, for they always point out 
as one of his two great faults his readiness, like 
General Grant, to receive presents. Now the forum 
is not exposed to the mercenary evil that broke the 
lyceum down. There is to be no worship of the 
golden calf. No admission fees and no collections 
made the rule. The money is supplied by funds and 
friends. And in the old lyceum 's golden age there 
were not as many lecturers as are now heard before 
the new forums, the commercial clubs, the many 
existing country and small town lyceums, the numer- 

[77] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

ous Chautauquas, and the women's social, charitable, 
and upward-influence organizations. The glory of 
Israel has not departed. The country has not gone 
sterile of orators. Four thousand persons among 
us live chiefly by lecturing. The lyceum, with 
present-day revivals, makes a splendid page of in- 
spirational history. It is distinctively American. In- 
deed, one of our ex-presidents calls it, the "most 
American thing in America/ ' 



[J*] 



VII 
NOT NEGRO CHURCHES, BUT CHURCHES 

Columbus on discovering the Gem of the Antilles 
exclaimed, "Santa Gloria!" but the natives say 
"Jamaica// which means "The Land of Fountains." 
Only two islands in the world, it is said, equal it in 
beauty, Java and Ceylon. Jamaica might be the 
original Garden of Eden, except for the lack of apple 
trees. The only way to describe the climate is to think 
of perfection. In my memory gallery is the vivid 
picture of an Isle of Rest, which has no succession of 
seasons, but each morning ushers in a perfect day in 
perfect June, where frosts are unknown, and where 
the cocoanut trees have no fixed seasons for blossoming 
and fruiting, but where orchards bloom and yield their 
ripened harvest at the same moment in an uninter- 
rupted "good old summer time." A single night's 
frost would annihilate almost the entire vegetation of 
Jamaica. About us are the happy-hearted children of 
the sun, black as Erebus. " Good-mawning, Honey," 
is the salutation from the Jamaica women, who are 
joyous and buoyant and interesting. They seem to 
have, all of them perfect health and good spirits. I 
wondered where the invalids were. If health is our 
greatest blessing, next to our holy religion and a good 
conscience, what would not a myriad of American 
women give for their Jamaica sister's possession of 
high spirits, health, and a spontaneous flow of 

[79] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

language, that seems to come from a happy, artless 
heart! These daughters of Ham are stalwart and 
soldier-like in their personal carriage. They are as 
erect as statues, have a step as elastic as a race-horse, 
carry the head with natural grace, and move with a 
firm, solid stride that means both strength and beauty. 
This uprightness of figure and this swinging gait are 
developed under the universal custom of bearing all 
their burdens on their heads. In the morning, on 
market-day, they came in like a flood, and later, they 
receded like the ebb. Some one has said that man 
was the principle object in creation, and woman, being 
made from a rib, was a side issue, but it is not so in 
Jamaica. The tread of the statuesque maidens, as 
the Scripture says, "black, but comely/' seems muffled, 
as nothing is addressed to the ear but the gentle 
patter, patter of their bare feet upon the smooth 
road. Their shoes, when worn, move, from habit, to- 
ward the church. The same young women that, in 
rather sketchy clothing, were bearing their head-loads 
on Saturday, are bravely dressed up the next day, for 
they live for Sunday, and fill their churches as we do 
not, particularly on Sunday nights. This is their most 
formative characteristic, and their faces look radiant 
when they speak of Sunday or even think of it. Their 
desire to appear well at public service is the chief 
incentive to the work and economy of the week. More 
money is spent on the adornment of the person than 
in the gratification of the appetite. What a market 
for American goods will be made when all our sable 
friends appear in reasonably, comely attire on week 

[80] 



NOT NEGRO CHURCHES, BUT CHURCHES 

days, as well as Sundays, and when, instead of keeping 
house in a nutshell, they begin to enlarge and furnish 
their dwellings. Negroes in the South and in the 
islands and in Africa are the greatest potential 
market in the world to-day. The building up of 
wealth follows a sharpening of the intellect. All little 
innocent blacknesses, as Charles Lamb called the 
London sweeps, are arrayed through the week in about 
such apparel as we associate with the Prodigal Son at 
the time of his return to his father's house, there being 
hardly cloth enough in their garments to make borders 
for the holes. It is not true in Jamaica that clothes 
make the man, the Sabbath excepted. This is a sun- 
blessed land, where the Negro question is settled, or 
where it simply does not exist. There are so few 
whites that their number is insignificant as regards the 
ordinary run of things on the island, and so no dis- 
tinctions are obtruded. The white people do not 
draw the color-line, and, of course, the others do not. 
There are no Negro churches, and yet, all the worship- 
pers, in any one of them, will be black, save a bare 
half-dozen whites. Taking the island, together, most 
of the ministers are black ; and yet, the white preachers 
in Kingston, the capital city, have black congrega- 
tions, the few white worshippers being scattered, like 
polka dots, pretty evenly among all the congregations. 
With almost an entire absence of other places of 
meeting, the church is the centre of even their social 
life. The pastor is an unique individual, and is a 
bureau of information, being besieged with questions, 
is the advisor of his people, a referee on matters of 

[81] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

grave importance, a peace maker, and a herald of 
civilization. The natural religious instincts seem 
strongest in colored people, and they have, in the 
United States, more members of the Christian Church, 
proportionately than any other. They make grand 
audiences. Here are youth and life and song and 
great numbers and faith unmixed with doubt. This 
capacity for religion carries the promise and prophecy 
of great development, unless we abandon the mis- 
sionary method at home and abroad, and remove the 
ladder up which the Puritans have risen in the world. 
Association with these exiles of Ethiopia reveals the 
reason that the ark, the lion's den, the wedding gar- 
ment, the marriage supper of the Lamb, the fitness of 
the dress on the resurrection morning, and everything 
that relates to the transit from this world to the next, 
have impressed themselves so indelibly upon their 
minds. They are an imaginative race, and, too, they 
have not derived their religious ideas from the written 
Word, nor from studying the pages of the Inspired 
Volume, but from their preachers and they remember 
best the realistic, the picturesque, on the principle that 
it is the illustrations "the bears' ' in a sermon that 
alone make it impossible for ministers to repeat it 
without its being recognized. It was finely suggestive 
to have the brakeman, a fine human form cut in 
ebony, open the door of the car and shout "Porus, 
Porus," named, of course, after one of the deserters 
in Columbus's own crew, who, losing faith in the king 
of discoverers, set out, on the island, to shift for him- 
self. In taking the census, and everywhere, three tints 

[82] 



NOT NEGRO CHURCHES, BUT CHURCHES 

are recognized; black, colored, and white; and those 
that are nearly white are, by law, classed as white. 
Here are American cars, but black conductors and 
brakeman and engineers. Who is jarred by colored 
trainmen, colored baggagemen and conductors? In 
a market, what difference does it make whether the 
supplies have come from a white or a colored farmer ? 
If a black gardener has a better article, the hotels — 
and they have the money — will {urn to him, and so 
will the poor people, if he has a real reason why pat- 
ronage should be turned his way, and so his business 
will grow. The forces of nature are color-blind and 
show no favor to black or white, as such. A black man 
can raise as much from the soil as can the whitest white 
man. Nature has no race prejudice, and does not ask 
a person his color. The soil is like folks, the more you 
love it the more it loves you, whether white or black. 
Nature's principle, if observed, would give a colored 
man the advantage of good location, if he deserves 
it, which, in some latitudes, is denied him now, keeping 
him from the best streets, when any business in any 
city, no matter how well manned, will fall into decay 
in a poor location, such as a colored man, for the sole 
reason that he is colored, must take. Nature's prin- 
ciple, too, would make him feel, if arrested and pun- 
ished, that he is not an object of persecution and 
proscription, and would cause him to discriminate be- 
tween himself and his vices. Accentuating the dis- 
tinction between right and wrong, and not the lines of 
racial descent, would break the force of the infamous 
maxim, that all Negroes are blood brethren and that 

[83] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

they must not do anything against their color, even 
if it is found on the wrong side. But evolution is 
patient and the door of reform is never closed. It is 
not fair to judge any people en bloc. The colored peo- 
ple of Jamaica are more contented and happy than 
those of their race in this country, and yet, no friend 
of American Negroes would advise them to go to 
Jamaica, for in forty-eight years of freedom here, 
more progress has been made than in the seventy-three 
years since emancipation there. For example, in 
Jamaica, seventy-five per cent, of the colored children 
are not called to keep the commandment, ' ' Honor thy 
father' ' . . . for the reason that so large a majority 
of them can say, as the gifted Booker T. Washington 
does, ' ' I do not know who my own father was. I have 
no idea who my grandmother was. ' ' Our schools and 
teachers are fast displacing the idea that morality and 
religion, like the Jews and the Samaritans, have no 
dealings, one with the other. A short residence among 
the colored people reveals that they do not think that 
our Negro colleges should be put under the control of 
teachers and trustees of that race, which, neither be- 
fore nor after emancipation, could be left to itself. 
The Universities for colored youth exhibit relatively 
and exactly the position and the duties of each race 
and show practically what we believe will be the solu- 
tion of the race problem. In treating of this matter, 
however, we ought never to use the word problem ; but 
opportunity, for what we call a great problem is a 
great opportunity. White men are by nature 
pioneers, and have taken up arms and obtained, at a 

[84] 



NOT NEGRO CHURCHES, BUT CHURCHES 

great price, their freedom, while the slaves were helped 
by the whites to secure theirs, and such a relation 
came to exist that the nation cannot now be divided 
against itself with its two great forces alienated from 
each other and split asunder into hostile camps. For 
whites to assume the initiative and chief obligation in 
leading the toil-worn, whip-scared blacks up from 
slavery is consistent with the beginning made a half 
century ago for that people who, from no fault of their 
own, are the victim of circumstances. Their great 
need is of leaders, a Paul Revere to awake and give 
incentive, and a Sheridan to organize and set the 
pace. Colored people are quick to respond to whatever 
touches their sympathies. They seem best governed 
through their affections. The appeal that touches 
them must be addressed, not only to the head, but to 
the heart. The Negro is patriotic, benevolent, devoted, 
obliging, patient, self-sacrificing, possessing an able- 
bodied desire to help himself, and having in him all 
the latent qualities of a good citizen, he is 

"As much a man 
As moves the human throng among. 
As much the part of the great plan, 
With which creation's dawn began, 
As any of the throng/ ' 



[8s] 



VIII 
TYING THE SILKEN KNOT 

On my resigning a pastorate of nearly twelve 
years' duration, the congregation heard with surprise 
that I had married more persons than could at one 
time be seated in the church. From services rendered 
at Hymen's altar my income had come to average 
more than three hundred dollars per annum. 

Being some years in the ministry without being 
myself married, as wedding fees were lavished upon 
me, I sometimes wondered whether they would at 
length go for oats or for apparel for a possible associ- 
ate pastor, not feeling that I could afford the expense 
of both. When, however, my heart astonished me by 
growing imperious, I deducted from the sum of my 
wedding fees, which I had always sacredly kept in a 
little fund by themselves, enough to buy a ring, and 
then raised the question we used to discuss before the 
days of tariff reform, "And what shall we do with our 
surplus ? ' ' 

My hearing that all ministers who were in good 
and regular standing in this calling always gave their 
wedding fees to their wives — and the Scripture says 
that a bishop must be the husband of one wife — was 
an instant suggestion to me as to the direction in which 

[86] 



TYING THE SILKEN KNOT 

all back pay should be turned. The new associate 
pastor to whom I had given the right-hand of fellow- 
ship became the treasurer of this fund. To her I 
could go to borrow money whenever I needed help 
around some rugged corner. 

She soon discovered that for weddings, as well 
as for the shoe industry, there are two seasons, one 
of which culminates in the month of roses as the other 
does at Thanksgiving. At these eminent periods the 
exchequer of the associate pastor was sometimes en- 
larged by three weddings in a day. On our reaching 
our present home, and feeling comparatively unac- 
quainted, still the receipts from this fruitful source 
were fifty dollars within three weeks, and, while sit- 
ting at the table, with this article unfinished, I am 
called to make two hearts to beat as one. 

Not the least among one's joys is to find so many 
couples of young people, some of them by this time not 
so exceedingly young, who seem to remember the 
minister with such unmixed pleasure. I had never 
seen one young man until he came to engage me for 
his wedding. I next saw him at his marriage service. 
Always thereafter as I would be going, at five o'clock, 
for my daily exercise, to the gymnasium of the 
Young Men's Christian Association, he would be 
returning from his work. When we met thus, he 
would never say in passing, "How do you do?" or, 
" It is a pleasant day, ' ' but, bowing profoundly, would 
say, "I thank you." I thought I observed that the 

[87] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

flight of time added fervor to his salutation, which 
was without variation, ' ' I thank you. ' ' 
Later, 

A Deaf and Dumb Couple Came 

to the parsonage to be married. Their friends, bereft 
of hearing and of speech, gathered at a point which 
enabled them to look into the house from the opposite 
side of the street. Proximity avails nothing to the 
deaf and dumb. All they seek is to be within the 
range of vision. Standing in the parlor before the 
gaze of their admiring friends, having upon a pad of 
paper given assent to the ordinance, they joined hands 
at my request, and nodded an enthusiastic response 
to the written words, "I pronounce you man and 
wife. ' ' On hearing of the incident a friend remarked 
that he could understand how a mute marriage could 
be solemnized, but he did not so readily apprehend 
what a minister would do when it came to the prayer. 
To which the reply was made that the prayer was not 
addressed to the happy pair. 

On a subsequent day it was announced that I had 
callers. I went down, and found my mute friends 
whom I had tied together. I spent a long time with 
them in the plentiful use of stationery, stopping at 
times to sharpen my pencil, and then beginning again. 
Finally I excused myself a moment, and hastened to 
the associate pastor, and said: "Do come down and 
help me. I have been using all my wits for half an 
hour in trying by some indirect sentences to find out 
what it is they want/' 

[88] 



TYING THE SILKEN KNOT 

When in school the associate pastor, to avoid 
whispering and thus breaking the rules, had acquired 
the deaf and dumb alphabet, — in which, by rapid 
and violent use of the hands, accompanied by varying 
expressions of countenance, a great deal of meaning 
could be conveyed, — she little thought in the circum- 
stances under which she was acquiring the language 
that she was fitting herself for the very difficult duties 
and responsibilities of a minister's wife. She found 
in a moment that the couple had come to make a 
polite call, and to this day sometimes entertains us by 
the signs and gestures which the bride — who found 
no trouble in bridling her tongue, nor in exemplifying 
the truth that if speech is silver, silence is golden — 
used in gleefully bearing testimony to the glad fact 
that her husband was tender toward her and kind. 

Upon another day a policeman appeared before 
the house, having a couple in tow that had agreed to 
be married. They were asked into the parlor, and he 
planted his huge bulk in the frame of the only door 
that would yield them exit. 

The service being over, the bridegroom asked me 
how much he had damaged me. 

I replied, " Not at ail." 

He inquired again, ' ' How much do you ask ? ' ' 

"Nothing. My church provides for me. I make 
no charge." 

He said he thanked me. I told him he was wel- 
come. At which the burly policeman electrified the 
new benedict by lifting his hand and, pointing his 
index finger first at him and then toward me, exclaim- 

[89] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

ing loudly: "You give him something. The elder is 
trying to be a gentleman; now let us see you begin 
by being one ; you give him something. ' ' 

Then instantly, with an expression of nervous 
solicitude, like the war-god in the "Iliad," the bride- 
groom suddenly "smote his thigh with a down stroke 
of his hands. ' ' This act in his case was not ' * peniten- 
tial/' He was feeling in his clothes to see if he could 
find any loose silver or other portable property 
wherewith to meet the sudden requirements of this 
unexpected stress of life. All of his available means 
aggregated one dollar, thus leaving him indebted 
by twenty-five cents to the associate pastor, as the 
law of this State allows a dollar and a quarter to the 
clergyman for performing this most beneficient of all 
his services. 

In order not to be invidious, as the couples that 
were married in our church always had Mendelssohn 's 
Wedding March played in their honor, being in 
Geneva we had this same suggestive and memorable 
air put into a music-box, so that the instant we heard 
the slam of the hack door in front of the parsonage, 
announcing that the bridal couple had alighted, we 
could begin to wind up this automatic musical instru- 
ment, and thus disappoint none of our welcome 
visitors by not supplying with each matrimonial 
service an appropriate march. 

No opportunity, however, was afforded for the 
sweet influences of music when, on returning one 
evening from some pastoral calls, perhaps too ex- 
tended, I noticed, in passing the parlor door, a young 

[90] 



TYING THE SILKEN KNOT 

couple awaiting my coming. I said, ' ' Good evening, ' ' 
but they made no reply, but solemnly rose, and care- 
fully joined their right hands in silence, and then 
looked at me significantly and suggestively, as much as 
to say, "We have waited too long to waste time in 
words: what we want is the exercise of your office." 

Knowing my theme, the associate pastor emphati- 
cally enjoins me not to tell the gentle reader about 
the oddities of weddings, which I have even now only 
begun to catalogue, but to describe the pretty, senti- 
mental scenes where the brides came in carriages to 
the parsonage, wearing light dresses, with many 
flowers and no hats, and became crimson with blushes 
from sheer bashfulness. This the limitation of my 
space forbids. 

The time will never come when humanity will lose 
its peculiar interest in weddings. ' ' All the world loves 
a lover." "A man," says Emerson, "is like a bit of 
Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in 
your hand, until you come to a particular angle ; then 
it shows deep and beautiful colors. ' ' Herein, some one 
has said, lies the subtle skill of the true wife ; she de- 
tects in her husband the latent vein of golden ore: 
she knows how to expose that particular angle of his 
character which reveals the finest hues. It is marvel- 
ous how womanly love will drape in royal robes the 
most unkingly of creatures; how it persists in seeing 
in the idol to which it has once given its allegiance a 
greatness and a goodness, an excellence of motive and 
conduct, which the world is unable to discover ; how it 
finds a reason for a weakness, and an excuse for a 

[9i] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

fault ; how it seeks to divest even sin of its shame and 
repulsiveness. While it is true that no man is a hero 
to his valet, yet it is certain that if he appear not as 
one to his wife, the failure must be of his own making. 
A writer who has essayed a scientific study in this 
line of research, says one of our most graceful Itera- 
tors, affirms that "romantic love," or, as he defines it, 
" prematrimonial love," "is a modern sentiment less 
than a thousand years old;" and is sure that "the 
Bible takes no account of it," and that it has no 
recognition in ancient classic literature. Be that as it 
may, it is here now. All my observation teaches me 
that it is likely to stay. And let all the people 
say, "Amen." 



[92] 



IX 
THE SUPERLATIVE VACATION 

When a hot dispute had been finished it was left 
to two judges to decide upon the finest route in 
England. Both wrote on slips of paper. One of 
them, being unfolded, read "From Coventry to War- 
wick.'' The other crisply stated, "From Warwick 
to Coventry." After all the discussion about vaca- 
tion if two judges are asked to decide what is the 
pleasantest course in summer, the report is herewith 
submitted in writing: One of them says, "From 
Salem to Lenox;" the other affirms, "From Lenox 
to Salem." The trip must be made in a light car- 
riage, having a wooden pail wherewith to water the 
steed, pendant from the hind axle. The high stepper, 
whose family name is Victor, an alert, handsome, 
well-bred individual, with a star in his forehead, 
and with an abundance of nervous energy, mettle 
and spring, enjoyed the outing as much as his 
master, for his high spirits rose every mile of the 
way, which always seemed short, proving that even 
a horse needs a vacation as well as a man, or a 
minister's wife. 

The most interesting and most sensitive speci- 
mens of the equine race are not only docile, but 
affectionate and capable even, of a deep and lasting 
attachment. They seem to have a real craving for 
human notice. They dislike to be left in solitary 

[93] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

positions. They are distinctly and noticeably gre- 
garious, and in their wild state are never found 
alone. Essentially, by their very nature, they must 
love something. It touches the heart to have a 
horse reach out his forefoot and begin to paw until 
his master assures him that he recognizes him, and 
comes up along side of him, and speaks to him, and 
pets him. And the horse likes it. I confess to a feel- 
ing of pleasure and even of pride, when leaving the 
horse outside the door, I have gone into a house 
and have heard him whinny for me to return to 
him. In my vanity, I had hoped other people would 
notice it. I am so human as to have become infatu- 
ated with the friendship of a choice courser of 
superior breeding, such as we find among the best 
horses, in the light harness class. There is a beauti- 
ful sympathy by which a superb animal, with unused 
possibilities of speed, and his driver seem to be one, 
which a man cannot feel in handling the ribbons 
over the back of a thick headed, dull witted cart 
horse. Some one asked, "Will not the automobile 
displace the horse' ' "It will if it hits him," and 
only then. From my English ancestry, by inheri- 
tance and habit, I have come to admire the intelli- 
gence, beauty and superb action of a high headed, 
spirited steed. I would rather draw the reins over 
him than to sit on the front seat of a road engine 
and turn a wheel. An automobile, though painted 
red, does not tempt me to exchange my beautiful 
bay. From a lad, my sympathies have flowed out to 
the Arab of the desert whose whole property con- 

[94] 



THE SUPERLATIVE VACATION 

sisted of a fine mare that the French Consul pur- 
chased to send to his sovereign, Louis XIV. Hunger 
and that of wife and children, weighing heavily, 
momentarily turning the scales, induced the Arab 
to bring the mare to the dwelling of the Consul, 
where, dismounted and standing leaning against 
her, with eyes dimmed with tears, he looked now at 
the gold and then at his favorite. 

"My beautiful! my beautiful! 

That standest meekly by, 
With thy proudly arched and glossy neck, 

And wild and fiery eye, 
Who said that I had given thee up? 

Who said I had thee sold? 
7 Tis false ! 'tis false, my Arab steed, 

I'll fling them back their gold." 

You will be told that, in a day, with an automo- 
bile a party has covered the distance from Albany, 
N. Y. I am not now thinking of covering long dis- 
tances. If so, I can take a seat in a Pullman car and 
look out of the window. I want to exorcise the 
demon of hurry. How much in haste the people of 
today look. Watch them rush and push through the 
depots to clamber quickly into their automobiles. 
When seated, the chauffeur opens to the last notch, 
all the speed he dares to use, and they roll off in a 
cloud of dust, as if they, for some reason were behind 
time. Vacation pleasure is rather to be found in en- 
joying, with a spirit of leisure, the rural scenes by 
the wayside, the birds and brooks, the field and 
forests, sharing the enjoyment meanwhile with your 

[95] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

seatmate in the carriage, and with, your thorough- 
bred Arabian in shape, and of handsome style and 
quality in the thills. This is to enjoy a horse. Presi- 
dent Roosevelt tried to keep the country stirred up 
over a greater navy. In the event of war, however, 
our lack will not be big ships, nor will it be 
chauffeurs who can handle with skill these huge 
upholstered road and speed machines. Nor will it 
be patriots, whose hearts are with the country, and 
whose leisure is spent in the highback seats of an 
automobile. But the deficiency will be just where 
it was found in Rome's earlier experiences and on 
the Union side in the earlier days of the Civil 
War, in men who are familiar with a horse and 
who could supply a cavalry service. Stonewall 
Jackson, the hero of the flank movement, gained his 
great victories and his great reputation by the 
celerity of his movements made possible by the 
familiarity of Southerners with horses. When 
pressed in battle, the Russians could fall back 
sullenly, and the Japanese, unfamiliar with horses, 
could not strike their flank, nor cut off their retreat. 
The mastery of nations has in every case come from 
the possession of horses. The amazing rapidity of 
the spread of Mohammedanism came from the same 
sort of ownership. If with the improvement of fire- 
arms, cavalry grows less effective, yet recent experi- 
ences in war show, that in future, the conspicuous 
part will be borne by mounted infantry. At Chatta- 
nooga, in preparation for the Spanish War, some 
young patriots, although clutching at the reins with 

[96] 



THE SUPERLATIVE VACATION 

both hands in frantic efforts to hold themselves on, 
kept tumbling off their mounts while performing, 
in a great cloud of dust, the evolutions peculiar to 
cavalry men. Nothing short of being strapped on 
could, I thought, save them in their inexperience. 
Nations as well as individuals, are under incalcul- 
able obligations to our noblest friend, the horse. He 
gives to life its spice and its prize, and to some men 
like Paul Revere, and Phil Sheridan, their earthly 
immortality. He is the greatest pleasure giver to 
man. Through even a long period of years, when 
toil has been heavy, and brain-fag insupportable, he 
has been allied with me in all the pleasure I have 
had. We are, and are to be inseparable. Ahead of 
all my other pastimes, I rank my hours spent with 
him in God's own great out-of-doors. Daguerreo- 
typed for all time, is the delineation before me still 
of the morning we crossed the Hoosac mountain, in 
the Piedmont of America. That day was a high day. 
We reached the base the preceding evening, in order 
to facilitate our ascent on the morrow. Soon after 
the day had really begun, when few, save the dairy 
keeper, the proverbial early worm and the ever 
punctual sun have risen, and the forest melody 
begins, we commence to mount to rugged heights 
and to obtain from point to point, commanding 
views of an expansive plain that is rank with fer- 
tility. The summits of the distant hills on the 
remotest rim of the valley, showed "like a Catherine 
Pear, the side that's next the sun." Oh, blessed, 
beneficent, idyllic day! day like Paradise! 

[97] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

glorious air and benign mountain! sunshine warm 
and sweet! What a place to listen! "And all the air 
a solemn stillness holds.'' What a vista as we sit 
thus between earth and sky. One finds himelf in 
the center of a vast panorama, the circumference of 
which is at least three hundred miles. The grandeur 
of the scene silences all comment as we gaze upon 
it. It is the mountain's beautiful call to read from 
the book of nature and to commune with her and 
to receive inspiration. Here would I like to place for 
the space of at least an hour, a man like Dr. John- 
son, who occasionally went into the country, but 
only to see his friends, never to see the country, 
who cared for a tree only as firewood or lumber and 
who thought a man demented who enjoyed living 
out of town. A part of the way is through delight- 
ful woods, vocal with birds, and brilliant with wild 
flowers, where every breath is charged with aromatic 
fragrance. At one point, we left the carriage to go 
to the mountain's brow, and look down upon trains 
appearing like toys that steam slowly up the valley, 
and shoot into the tunnel below. Standing above 
this aperture, which in proportion to the mountain, 
seemed so small, I could understand the perturba- 
tion of the Irishman, who said he could not help 
thinking what would happen if the train missed the 
hole. How great the privilege to live for a little 
while close to Nature 's heart, and listen to her gentle 
teachings of God, as we do when, for the whole day 
together, we hear the ripple, murmur and babble of 
running brooks. Not a sound, however, from the 

[98] 



THE SUPERLATIVE VACATION 

busy world disturbs the Acadian stillness. Refresh- 
ing as perfume-laden breezes from the celestial 
plains is the entire length of our wooded roadway. 
The man who can lock up his cares once a year 
and adopt this plan of vacation draws out one, at 
least, of the many nails which he has already driven 
into his coffin during long days of mental and physi- 
cal over-tasking. He lengthens his lease of life and 
begins at this point to impart a finer quality to what 
he does. If a man were ever touched with insomnia 
and needed to reform his habit, and educate his 
sleep, how much better than loading his system with 
opiates and drugs, is that slumber that he gets on 
an outing like this, when every night he sleeps the 
sleep of the just-arrived. Such a journey seems to 
divide one 's life in two by the new ideas it suggests 
and the new interests it awakes. When General 
Cogswell represented this district in Congress he 
spent many of his vacations in driving about the 
country roads of this vicinage. Essex County has 
as many people in it as the entire state of Vermont, 
and four times as much wealth. He came to have 
great familiarity with the life of the people, ability 
to interpret their need and great popularity. You 
respect the man for his course. It is instructive to 
see how people live widely in the whole state, with 
which for life you have cast in your lot. As you 
thread her byways, you ponder the simplicity with 
which some people who dwell in the country manage 
to exist. It first reveals to us the many unreal 

[99] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

wants which the city and civilization have created 
and saddled upon us. 

Hurrying to cover when thunder showers were 
imminent as we were forced five times to do in the 
first fortnight, only gave to us all pleasurable excite- 
ment ; and in an absence of five weeks while we were 
driving around the state of Massachusetts, going by 
a northerly route, and returning by a southerly 
course, no moisture ever reached us. The roads as a 
rule, would fill the fondest dreams of an automo- 
bilist. They are hard, smooth and in many places, 
kept like a lady's parlor. More than once we crossed 
rivers on ferries. To escape a sudden deluge of rain 
near the Deerfield River, we drove in upon the 
covered bridge, and sat there an unconscionable 
time after the clouds had rolled by, mistaking the 
noise of the turbulent river on the rocks beneath for 
rain on the roof. At Williamstown, as a storm was 
about to burst upon us, we drove by permission, into 
a barn whose opportune door stood hospitably open. 
One of us was invited into the farmer's house, and 
so friendly became the kindred spirits that after- 
ward, while we were driving about this college town 
in the Switzerland of America, the children from 
this cottage would watch for us, and bring great 
handfuls of flowers. The small boy of this sturdy 
Scotch family saw me Sunday in the Williamstown 
church, exchanged glances with me, and came to me 
at the close of the service, and mentioned to me my 
duty to attend the Sabbath school, commending a 
teacher. And speaking of Sundays, let me be swift 

[100] 



THE SUPERLATIVE VACATION 

to name our tranquil, joyous, radiant days at North- 
field. One gallery of the church is packed with chil- 
dren, who with vigorous, effective leadership, engage 
in independent and in responsive song. The effect 
is inspiring. The best thing about the place is its 
spirit. The drives on different days with different 
friends are enchanting. Throughout the fresh, 
clean, handsome town is felt the predominating 
influence of one great man. At every repast at l ' The 
Northfield," conducted by Ambert G. Moody, dys- 
peptics eat with impunity. Ministers " laugh right 
out loud. ' ' Scholars sleep all night. Men in danger 
of softening of the brain find their brains growing 
hard and their hearts soft. Money seems sanctified. 
A vacation that tends directly to develop the much- 
neglected power of observation, from an educative 
point of view, has everything to commend it. 

No sooner have you reached Arlington than you 
begin to pass a line of plainly and fully inscribed 
slabs indicating where fights occurred and where 
colonists were shot on the day of the Battle of Con- 
cord. Finding it time to water your horse, you 
look up and from a tablet read this inscription: "At 
this well, April 19th, 1775, James Hayward of Acton, 
met a British soldier, who raising his gun, said, 
4 You're a dead man.' 'And so are you/ replied Hay- 
ward. Both fired; the soldier was instantly killed 
and Hayward mortally wounded. " Then comes 
Lexington with its exquisite little museum. The 
wonderful variety and suggestiveness of the articles 
are enough to make a collector go mad with jeal- 

[101] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

ousy. Then comes Concord, with its Minute-man, 
graves of British soldiers, "The rude bridge that 
arched the flood,' ' Old Manse, The Wayside, the 
homes of the Alcotts, Hawthorne, Thoreau and 
Emerson. If because of wide journeyings, you are 
asked to name a typical New England town, your 
mind will probably revert to Concord. Taken all 
in all, it is about "the pick of the basket." The 
Deerfield valley too, has its museum of astonishing, 
consuming interest, and is everywhere inscribed 
with the romantic history of strife between the re- 
treating Indians, and the pioneer whites. Its monu- 
ments tell of ambuscades and annihilation. And 
there are Littleton with its Reuben Hoar library, 
given in recognition of a kindness done the donor's 
father and Zoar and Mt. Holyoke and Great Bar- 
rington, once the home of Br} r ant and then came the 
scenes of Beecher's Star-Papers. On the grand state 
tour from Hartford to Albany, you come upon 
Stockbridge, which became Spotless Town, origi- 
nally by the agency of the Laurel Hill Association, 
the real parent of all village Improvement Societies. 
Here is a unique mission tower of stone, erected by 
David Dudley Field, on the spot where the Mission 
of the Indians stood. Its chimes at sunset are 
delicious. A roughly hewn monolith, on a cairn, 
marks the old Indian Burial and Council Ground. 
Jonathan Edwards with a wife and ten children had 
a salary here of $35 a year, but he was to have 100 
sleigh loads of wood, of which the Indians were to 
furnish eighty, and the white settlers twenty. Here 

[102] 



THE SUPERLATIVE VACATION 

in a room, six feet by nine, "Edwards on the Will" 
was written, the greatest production of the Ameri- 
can mind. 

A Boston atmosphere pervades Stockbridge, 
while the New York idea prevails at Lenox. It 
becomes not only a matter of interest, but of 
continuous amusement to us to find how absolutely 
powerless people are to give any real help or direc- 
tion respecting the roads. When you address them a 
question they will in the kindness of their hearts, 
strive to render a service whether they really know 
anything about the matter or not. We found we 
were more often misled than helped by them. Their 
unfamiliarity with most of the roads was incredible 
to me, until I began to apply the tests to my own 
home locality. I believe it possible for a man and 
his wife, travelling by carriage, to drive into Salem 
and in succession inquire of thirty intelligent 
persons the road to Andover, which is in the same 
County, and not get information enough to pay them 
for their trouble. Ipswich is on a thoroughfare in 
this county and yet there are few people in Salem 
that could tell wayfarers more than to cross over 
to Beverly and inquire again. Everybody can tell 
you what railroad station to go to or where to take 
the trolley. A pocket edition of a large state map 
soon becomes one's unfailing and sufficient and 
almost exclusive reliance. In this carriage drive 
of more than a month, in which as things were going, 
gaily with us, we made a long detour from North- 
field up into Vermont and New Hampshire. My sym- 

[103] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

pathetic companion in the matter of this kind of a 
vacation, resolved to catalogue the names of all the 
different birds that she was enabled to recognize. 
To this end "Little brothers of the air," "In Nest- 
ing Time" and "Birdways," Birdcraft" were laid 
under contribution. Nothing refreshes and rejuve- 
nates the mind like a new interest. It endows the 
intellect with another sense. Some books have an 
out-door atmosphere about them. I have been 
interested to see if I could give the names of all the 
trees that were about me, when we tied the horse 
to a sapling, and loafed for awhile in a grove or 
forest. When the languor that always characterizes 
the first few days of summer begins to abate, I have 
found in this form of vacation the best kind of 
opportunity and the disposition to read a few good 
books. While a shower is passing over the village, 
or during some day that has grown warm, by having 
driven in the freshness of the summer morning, and 
resuming only in the later afteroon, one can turn 
to his books, by some stream or among the cathedral 
pines, or on the veranda of the hotel. The savor of 
them is like the smell of fruit. There is a hunger 
of the mind and books have a distinct relish. I can 
remember my several vacations best in terms of the 
books that I read. The Medo-Persic Law that deter- 
mines summer reading is that it shall be interesting. 
Books that fail to wake the mind do us very little 
good. Let a man follow his tastes. "In brief, sir, 
study what you most affect," Harvey's Webster, 
Palfrey's Life of General Bartlett, Mrs. Custer's 

[104] 



THE SUPERLATIVE VACATION 

Tenting on the Plains, The Autocrat and Professor 
at the Breakfast Table, Anderson's The Country 
Town, Bailey's The Outlook to Nature, are volumes 
in which a man can glory as one that findeth great 
spoil. The reader thus is surprised at his high 
degree of enjoyment. It is accounted for in the same 
way that we explain the fact that vacationists always 
over-estimate the ability of the ministers they hear 
during summer outings, and wish to call them at 
once to city pulpits. Our minds are rested, and re- 
ceptive and imaginative during our long recess. 
"True Human Life," says Lotze "first begins in the 
leisure that follows labor." "Where are all the 
disagreeable people?" said a man when upon his 
vacation, not knowing that the change was all his 
own, and sprang from being rested. As we are, we 
see, we feel. Even the dumb creatures about us 
must notice the difference. "Wait for the wagon," 
is the morning song. Making a fresh departure and 
a new arrival each day contributes to the heart both 
a morning and an evening cheer and gladness. Our 
heavy valise we would always send by express to 
some town ahead of us. Hostelries are excellent 
after one passes out a few parasangs from Boston, 
since the Metropolis is expected to do the work of 
entertatining for its contiguous territory. We are 
not obliged to lug along the conversation with unin- 
teresting people, as would become a social necessity 
if we were continuous guests at some resort with 
summer boarders. While we are every day at the 
center of the life of each little community, still there 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

is a distinct element of rest in a temporary detach- 
ment from people. As I sit here I can shut my eyes 
and this moment see the dooryard and barn where 
I took care of my own horse, unharnessing, and 
later hooking him up. And I enjoyed it superla- 
tively. You sometimes hear the expression, "He 
don't care for me." "What a depth of meaning in 
that expression. It signifies that no affection exists. 
The implication is that when one cares for another 
an affection is developed. And there is a fact. If 
you want to love a horse, you must personally give 
him some attention. I enjoy going round to the 
barn to see that the only member of the party that 
cannot fully speak for himself, is well-fed and has 
comfortable care. I like the errand. Although 
others are about the barn, he will neigh at my 
approach and turn his well-shaped head full of 
character, with clear intelligent eyes, of the speak- 
ing kind, toward me for a caress. Such a warm- 
blooded, sensitive horse will always exhibit, in ways 
of his own, the friendly relationship that exists 
between us. 

As a man cares for a lawn, or an estate better, 
if it is his own, and has more pleasure in it, so a 
man always enjoys more doing something for a 
perfect picture of style and quality, with flowing 
mane and tail, that is a lovable member of his own 
family, than he does for a sluggish, shuffling hack- 
horse, deficient in intelligence, spirit and good looks, 
that has been temporarily hired from a livery. That 
writer well understood human nature, who said, that 

[106] 



THE SUPERLATIVE VACATION 

he never saw a man who had a poor horse or a poor 
dog. Each man thinks his own is something remark- 
able, and so will speak up for him and this is at times 
needed; particularly at the location of summer 
assemblies. At one such point, I found a vacationist 
who shared my opinion. As he drove up with a 
bright span, I saw at a glance that he was holding 
the reins over more than a thousand dollars. He 
said, " These places are delightful to visit, but they 
know nothing about a horse." The idea of the stable- 
boy or of some undesirable citizen, who was forced 
to work, if at all, for a boy's wages, seemed to be 
to stand at the threshold of the barn and to peel off 
the harness as he ran the horses in and then to treat 
all the equine guests in a sort of collective way, 
which saves the boy but does not save the high 
spirits, the silky hair, the right-up-on-edge condi- 
tion of the horses. Exactly a year previous, I had 
visited the capitals and art galleries of Europe, but 
for rejuvenation and for physical benefit, and enjoy- 
ment, I liked this vacation best. I have tried every 
sort of outing east and west, north and south, here 
and there, in camp and in beautifully located hotels, 
but for recreation, change and physical and mental 
benefit, this crowns all. I will say of it, as David did 
of Goliath's sword, " There is none like that. Give 
it me." 



[107] 



X 

THE PRINCE OF PREACHERS 

In native gracefulness and charm of person, in 
clear, distinct enunciation, in bold, vehement gesture, 
in glow and expressiveness of countenance, in melodi- 
ous and variable intonations of voice, in a most capti- 
vating fascination that speedily enchains the listening 
thousands, in all that constitutes the qualities and 
manners of a pulpit orator, the world has never seen 
the superior, nor even the equal, of George "Whitefield. 
Others have approached him in some of his gifts ; but 
in their superlative aggregation, in their brilliant 
employment, and in unquestionable genius this 
Apollos of the modern pulpit stands alone. He says 
that his spirit would make such sallies that he thought 
it would escape from his body. 

Such a spell would he cast over his audience that 
mechanics shut up their shops and the day-laborers 
threw down their tools to go to hear him preach, and 
few were unaffected. The oftener he preached, the 
keener the edge he seemed to put upon the desire to 
hear him again. The piercing glance of a singularly 
brilliant eye, which as he proceeded toward the close 
seemed to sparkle with celestial fire, contributed in no 
small measure to the force of his appeals. 

"I was enabled to lift up my voice like a trum- 
pet," he once exclaimed; and Dr. Franklin, who was 
the most accurate of men, made some exact estimates 

[108] 



THE PRINCE OF PREACHERS 

to prove that his clear, full, musical voice could be 
heard distinctly in the open air by thirty thousand 
persons. One clear day, while preaching in Phila- 
delphia, he was heard at Gloucester Point, two miles 
below the city and on the other side of the Delaware. 
His unrivalled powers found full play in such an 
arena as that presented at King's Wood, near Bristol, 
where he was carried out beyond himself as he 
preached to twenty thousand people standing in such 
solemn silence as to fill him with profound admiration. 
He could see the effect of his words by the white gut- 
ters made by the tears which trickled down the 
blackened cheeks of the colliers who came unwashed 
out of the coal-pits to hear him. 

At Cambuslang he preached three times on the 
very day of his arrival, although he had preached that 
same morning at Glasgow, and began his third dis- 
course at nine o'clock at night; and the magical 
eloquence continued until eleven. In his little 
memorandum-book we find such a record as this: 
"Yesterday preached three times. This day Jesus 
hath enabled me to preach seven times." His exer- 
tions increased with his success. In the compass of a 
single week, and that for years, he spoke, in general, 
forty hours, and often sixty, and that to thousands. 
At the death of his only child his friends united in 
the request that he should omit preaching until after 
the burial; but he preached twice the day after its 
death and once the day following, and the bell was 
tolling for the funeral before he left the pulpit. "When 
health was failing him, he placed himself on "short 

[109] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

allowance, ' ' and so preached only once each weekday, 
and thrice on Sunday. In his public ministry of 
thirty-four years he preached eighteen thousand ser- 
mons, which are more than five hundred each year and 
ten every week. 

By a subtle art of word-painting he would draw 
such vivid pictures of the things he was handling that 
he seemed to turn men 's ears into eyes, and make them 
see things as palpably present which he with such 
vivid picturesqueness described. Thus in New York 
he adopted a nautical tone ; and, when the storm was 
gathering, the ship dismasted, and the terrible moment 
had at length come, he exclaimed, "What next?" 
"Take to the long-boat, sir, the long-boat !" ejaculated 
some excited mariners who were present. He was very 
ready at this kind of delineation, which frequently 
answers the ends of real scenery and keeps the com- 
pact thousands in an attitude of eager interest and 
charmed attention. 

Having been in court, and having noted the 
solemnity produced as the judge put on his con- 
demning-cap to voice a prisoner's doom, the blood 
from stoutest hearts ran cold soon afterward when, 
near the close of his discourse, he, after an awe- 
producing rhetorical pause, which always shows that 
a speaker is in possession of the situation, solemnly 
exclaimed: "I am about to put on the condemning- 
cap. Sinner, I must do it. I must pronounce sen- 
tence. ' ' 

As naturally as Mr. Beecher, in discoursing upon 
the hidden pound in a napkin, slipped his handker- 

[no] 



THE PRINCE OF PREACHERS 

chief apparently unconsciously under the Bible, so 
Whitefield, in referring to Peter's tears when the cock 
crew, would have a fold of his gown ready in which 
to hide his face. Thus to dramatize a scriptural inci- 
dent would have been offensive, had it not been 
rendered admirable by inimitable genius. 

Lord Chesterfield, himself the British Cicero, 
distinguished for his brilliant talents and elegant, 
though somewhat artificial, manners, was listening to 
the master orator as he compared a benighted sinner 
to a blind beggar led by a little dog on a dangerous 
road. The little dog breaks his string and gets away, 
and his master, with his staff between both hands, 
gropes along unconscious, to the edge of a cliff. Still 
feeling his way, standing on the verge of the precipice, 
his staff slips from his hands, and drops down the 
descent too deep to send back an echo. Supposing it 
to be on the ground, the owner stoops down to recover 
it, stumbles forward, and falls headlong. Instantly 
Lord Chesterfield, who had been watching with 
breathless alarm the blind man's movements, having 
lost all self-possession, unconsciously sprang from his 
seat to save the catastrophe, exclaiming: "Good 
! He's gone." 

As though it were no difficult matter to catch the 
sound of the Saviour praying, he would exclaim, 
' ' Hark ! hark ! do you not hear him ? ' ' Once his inter- 
rogatory seemed so individual that a negro present 
answered audibly, ' ' Yes, sir. ' ' 

Talents so extraordinary met inevitably with 
universal response, often in money for his orphan 

[in] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

house at Savannah, as when a single collection was 
found to consist of but little short of ten thousand 
pieces of copper. After the contribution had been 
made, the crowd gathered around his carriage, throw- 
ing their mites into the windows. 

Nor were they disappointed in the high character 
of the work done by the great master of pulpit oratory. 
His exquisite imagination could gild human speech 
with its last touch of beauty, as when after witnessing 
at the execution of a criminal that at the terrible 
moment all present, as if moved by one impulse, 
turned their heads aside and wept, he finally said: 
"How different was it when the Saviour of mankind 
was extended on the cross ! Not one of all who wit- 
nessed his agonies turned his head aside. Yes, my 
friends, there was one — that glorious luminary 
(pointing to the sun) veiled his brightness, and 
travelled on his course in tenfold night. ' ' 

But our first lesson derived from his surpassing 
eloquence and unparalleled success inheres in the fact 
that he trusted not to his native gifts, but increased 
their power by the most assiduous cultivation. His 
matchless elocution was not only an endowment, but 
an acquirement. If he preached a sermon twenty 
times, he went on to the last improving his method of 
delivering it, both as to tone and action. Garrick and 
Foote declare that he never reached the highest per- 
fection till the fortieth repetition. If he had given 
his sermons from a written copy, a later delivery 
would have been much like the first, his invention 
meanwhile sleeping. As he went on to improve his 

[112] 



THE PRINCE OF PREACHERS 

discourses, those parts were omitted which had been 
felt to come feebly from the tongue and fall heavily 
upon the ear. 

But it is affirmed that the salient points of his 
oratory were not prepared passages, but were bursts 
of passion, like jets from a geyser when the spring is 
in full play. "I would give one hundred guineas if 
I could say, ' Oh ! ' as Mr. Whitefield does, ' ' said Gar- 
rick, who went on to express his belief that that flute- 
like voice, which came to be in itself pure music, 
could raise tears by his simple intonation on the word 
' i Mesopotamia. ' ' An American clergyman related 
to him an affecting occurrence, but did it with the 
ordinary brevity and feeling of common conversation. 
Afterwards he heard Mr. Whitefield preach and tell 
this same story with such nature, pathos, and power 
that the clergyman found himself weeping like a child. 

Of all our faculties, that of speech is the least 
cultivated, and is yet most susceptible of improvement, 
and pays best for the pains bestowed upon it. Some 
of our foremost colleges are making a lamentable 
error in proceeding upon the theory that, if a man's 
thinking is good, his expression can take care of itself. 
After one has a thought, he has yet to consider what 
form will best give it currency. Bullion is not as at- 
tractive as coin. 

" There is a charm in delivery, a magical art, 
That thrills like a kiss from the lip to the heart, 
'Tis the glance, the expression, the well-chosen word, 
By whose magic the depths of the spirit are stirred; 
The smile, the mute gesture, the soul-stirring pause, 

[«3] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

The eyes' sweet expression that melts while it awes, 

The lips' soft persuasion, its musical tone, 

0, such were the eharms of that eloquent one." 

The world loves the orator. Honor is always paid 
to him who can speak well. Yet a noble negligence 
seemed to run through Whitefield's style. The ornate, 
florid strain he could not use. His diction is simple 
and conversational, not fitted for books, and hence 
best fitted for speech. English composition for 
speaking to hearers and English composition for 
private reading are almost like two different lan- 
guages; and as one of the finest adepts has shown, 
sermons which "preach" well "read" badly. The 
great pulpit orator of the world used idiomatic speech 
with charming simplicity, point, and colloquial direct- 
ness. And thus are we enabled to note as our second 
lesson the difference between literature of poetry and 
oratory. Genuine oratory is too earnest to admit of 
much ornament. Dr. Franklin has justly observed that 
it would have been fortunate for Whitefield's repu- 
tation if he had left no written works. His talents 
then would have been estimated by the effect which 
they are known to have produced. His writings 
afford merely the measure of his knowledge and of his 
intellect, but not of his genius as an orator. 

Poets, historians, orators, statesmen, ministers, — 
of whom one hundred have been present at one service, 
— actors, distinguished men in science and literature, 
even the kings and princes of the earth, Lord 
Dartmouth, Bolingbroke, Hume, Chesterfield, and 

[114] 



THE PRINCE OF PREACHERS 

Franklin, no mean judges of eloquence, the most deli- 
cate and best qualified critics of the day, and the 
very men from sceptical temperament who would be 
least likely to be deceived, attested his oratory to be 
of the truest and noblest kind; and yet we are most 
careful to notice, thirdly, that his ministry was aimed 
at the masses. The great preachers to the queen have 
first gained the approval of the common people. The 
rank and file know a good thing as well as those of 
the so-called higher classes, and are usually first to find 
it. 

The career of Whitefield sets out, fourthly, and 
with a vivid illustration, a sentiment which one of 
our most influential college presidents gave as his 
parting word to his graduates, — "Not only let your 
light shine in the world, but burn to the socket. ' ' Our 
Saviour implies that a burning is more than a 
shining light. Like the sun, the world's greatest 
Christian orator went down with undiminished force, 
as majestically as he rose. He has crossed the ocean 
thirteen times. Having taken cold in Portsmouth, 
where he addressed an entranced auditory with such 
clearness, pathos, and contagious emotion as to please 
and surprise the surrounding thousands, — as his 
whole soul seemed incandescent with a divine fire, they 
gazed, they listened, they stood in rapt and motionless 
attention, — he set out on horseback Saturday, Sep- 
tember 29, 1770, the day before he died, to fulfill an 
engagement to preach at New 7 buryport on Sunday. 

On his way, unfortunately, he was eagerly im- 

["5] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

portuned to preach at Exeter. The thinness of his 
visage, the pallor of his countenance, the evident 
struggling of the heavenly spark in a decayed body for 
utterance, were all deeply interesting. The spirit was 
willing, but the flesh was dying. His appearance 
alone was a powerful sermon. He arose from his seat, 
and stood erect. For several minutes he was unable 
to proceed. He then said, "I will wait for the gracious 
assistance of God ; for he will, I am certain, assist me 
once more to speak in his name. ' ' 

His address continued for two hours. It was an 
effort of stupendous eloquence, his final field-triumph ; 
and so bewitching were his tones, so surpassingly bril- 
liant was his imagination, and so deep and irresistible 
his pathos that he was enabled to sway the passions 
of men as with a magic hand, and wave after wave of 
sympathetic feeling rolled through the mighty host as 
he said, for example, near the close of his brilliant 
discourse : "I go, I go to a rest prepared. My sun has 
given light to many ; but now it is about to set — no, 
to rise to the zenith of immortal glory. I have outlived 
many on earth, but they cannot outlive me in heaven. 
My body fails, but my spirit expands. ' ' 

He then dined with a friend, and, though greatly 
fatigued, rode fifteen miles to Newburyport, where he 
supped with Rev. Jonathan Parsons, pastor of the Old 
South Church, in a house which is still standing in 
excellent form. He purposed to retire early, and, 
taking his candle in his hand, he paused at the stairs 
near the front door to address the anxious crowd who 

[116] 



THE PRINCE OF PREACHERS 

filled the street and hailed him as a messenger of God. 
Thus, lingering on the way to his room, while the 
throng gazed up at him with tearful eyes like Elisha at 
the ascending prophet, that voice, never surpassed 
in its music and touch upon the deepest chords in 
human hearts, flowed on in affectionate exhortation 
until the candle which he held in his hand burned out 
in its socket. 

That candle thus held evidently forth and con- 
sumed is a symbol etched upon the memory of man- 
kind, and will remain till the last syllable of recorded 
time. The orator, like the candle, burned to the socket. 
In the morning he was not, for God had taken him. 
In a severe attack of asthma, to which he had long 
been subject, he rose gasping for breath, and rushed 
to the window in a little room over the front door, to 
strive to regain his breath; and there from a high- 
backed chair, just as the sun was rising from the 
adjacent sea, he who was familiarly styled "the sera- 
phic," under convoy of angels, took his flight to the 
world of spirits. 



["7j 



XI 
THE GREAT AWAKENING 

The sermon at Enfield was in progress. Not 
only was the most celebrated theologian America 
ever produced subjected to an audible interruption, 
but a fellow clergyman who sat in the pulpit with 
him reached out his hand and took hold of the 
skirts of the preacher's coat to enforce attention to 
a question. 

"Mr. Edwards! Mr. Edwards! Is not God a 
God of mercy?" 

The train of circumstances leading up to this 
climacteric event was this : The greatest revival that 
the world had then known had earlier made its 
beginning at Northampton under the ministry of 
Jonathan Edwards, whom Robert Hall ranks as the 
greatest of the sons of men. Scarcely an individual, 
either old or young, had been left unconcerned in 
the community. Conversions averaged thirty a 
week. Souls came as it were by flocks into the fold. 
The appearance of one hundred together at a single 
sacramental season to make an open explicit con- 
fession of Christ was very affecting. 

The converts ranged from the child of four 
years to the man of seventy, and the church came 
to include almost the entire adult population of the 
place. The sanctuary was commonly crowded with 
an affected auditory, and at times the whole assem- 

[118] 



THE GREAT AWAKENING 

blage was dissolved in tears. Every one appeared to 
be pressing into the kingdom of heaven, and, while 
the people did not exactly neglect their worldly 
business, yet they presented a unique spectacle as 
they made Mammon's shrine second to that of Him 
who rideth upon the heavens, whose name is Jah: 
It was the most remarkable event of the kind that 
had occurred since the canon of the New Testament 
was finished. It seemed as if the millennium were 
coming down the street. 

A biography of Edwards should contain almost 
a complete account of the great revival, and his 
influence would be easily discernible on every lead- 
ing mind. Nobody ever spoke disparagingly of 
Jonathan Edwards who had read him. As he 
preached in his own church, the whole room was at 
times full of nothing but outcries. At the conclu- 
sion of one of his public exercises on the Sabbath, 
Mr. Edwards appointed the children that were under 
sixteen years of age to go from the church to a 
neighboring house, that he might further enforce 
what they had heard in public, and we learn that 
they were greatly affected by the warnings and the 
counsels that were given them, so that when dis- 
missed they almost all of them went home crying 
aloud through the streets to all parts of the town. 

Now it was out of this highly charged 
atmosphere that Mr. Edwards went to preach at 
Enfield. In other communities awaking from their 
heavy slumbers there had been a good response to 
the re-animated efforts of ministers, but Enfield was 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

incorrigible. Its inhabitants were unimpressible, 
cold and numb. So solicitous for them in their indif- 
ference had some of the Christians of the vicinage 
become, a proof of the prayerful interest felt on 
behalf of the town, that they spent the whole of 
the preceding night in importunate prayer. The 
appearance of the assembly after it had come 
together was listless, case-hardened, and vegetative. 

Mr. Edwards knew of a doctrine exactly suited 
to their situation. He chose for his text, " Their 
feet shall slide in due time," and proceeded to show 
them in an alarming manner the slippery places on 
which they stood. Their consciences, aroused, 
attested the fact; the impression of eternal things 
was awful and overwhelming. Some of the audience, 
rising in their places, seized fast hold upon the 
pillars and braces of the meetinghouse and sides 
of the pews, as if that very moment they felt their 
sliding feet were precipitating them into a bottom- 
less pit. Great waves of emotion passed tumultu- 
ously back and forth over the congregation, so that, 
the sermon being in progress, the people gave vent 
to their pent-up feelings by such sobbing, moaning, 
such breathing of distress and outcries, throughout 
the whole house, that the preacher was obliged to 
make a long pause, and to speak to the people and 
desire them to be silent in order that he might be 
heard. 

It will be remembered that Mr. Edwards some- 
times dealt with topics, which, if believed, cannot 
fail to have a deep influence upon the conduct of 

[120] 



THE GREAT AWAKENING 

otherwise obdurate men. When remonstrated with 
for employing a text as at Enfield that implies that 
a wicked man "is liable to fall of himself without 
being thrown by the hand of another, as he that 
stands or walks on slippery declining ground needs 
nothing but his own weight to throw him down," he 
replied that the doctrine was either true or not true; 
and, if it was true, it was no kindness to obscure the 
fact or to deliver it without warmth. "Without lift- 
ing the voice to any high dramatic intonation, the 
message, so devoid of sensationalism as to be lack- 
ing in gesture, was simply delivered with the calm 
assurance of unconquerable conviction. There was 
an unction, a quiet intensity, a savor of God, about 
the man that constituted power, and caused the con- 
gregation to weep aloud. His hearers felt him. 

The source of his unequalled intellectual 
strength was his mother, whose philosophy broke 
out amid kitchen and parish duties. She was a meta- 
physician without knowing it. She possessed a more 
stern and powerful intellect than her husband, was 
fond of reasoning and of pondering the deepest 
problems of theology, and, had St. Paul's prohibi- 
tion been out of the way, she might have eclipsed 
her husband in the pulpit and anticipated the fame 
of her immortal son. ' ' His name, ' ' Dr. Chalmers says, 
"is far the highest of which the New World can 
boast." 

It was remarkable that God at this time so 
quickly set up his kingdom even among the remote 
Indians under David Brainerd. It was accomplished 

[121] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

within a year, so sudden was the transition from 
idolatrous feasts and sacrifices to the Lord's table. 
But what swept this young and ardent apostle and 
his copper-colored disciples up into such prominence 
in the early religious history of New England lies in 
the significance of the fact that their reformation, 
sobriety, and compliance with the rules and duties of 
Christianity were so general and thorough, and yet 
sprang from the internal power and influence of 
the doctrines of grace and the action of divine truth 
upon the heart, and not from any exterior effort to 
lop off their vices. 

Typical of the great awakening among all the 
churches we find in Middleboro, Mass., as Rev. Peter 
Thatcher was delivering an exhortation, a melting, 
hallowing influence fell upon the assembly. The 
stoutest hearts seemed to dissolve like wax before 
an increasing fire. Some cried out with terror, and 
every heart, without even an exception, seemed 
penetrated with an arrow from the quiver of the 
Almighty. As a result of this one sermon the pastor 
had seventy-six written accounts of individuals 
whose minds were anxious and laboring. Some pro- 
fessors of religion found that, lacking the oil of 
grace, their lamps had gone out. Four persons de- 
tained from worship, being left alone in their several 
dwellings, were awakened that same day by think- 
ing of their solitariness. The prison-doors were 
opened and their captive souls set free. The Lord 
led them forth, and spake comfortably to them, 
saying, "Live." 

[122] 



THE GREAT AWAKENING 

Scores of people told the minister that day of 
their hatred of him above any other person living. 
He had himself lamented his own unfruitfulness and 
the indifference of his parishioners. As only one 
individual had offered to unite with the church for 
nearly two years, he proposed to resign, but could 
find no suitable text for a farewell sermon. The 
panacea needed for a discouraged pastor and dis- 
affected church is simply a revival. 

In his own spirit the flame of holier fire caught 
from the inner sanctuary never suffered any abate- 
ment, but rather grew brighter and brighter, until 
its light was lost in the glories of the heavenly 
world. In the thick of prodigious evangelistic work, 
having come to his death, there was such an extra- 
ordinary confluence of people from the neighboring 
towns as was never seen before, to attend the 
funeral. When the coffin was carried out, there was 
great weeping, and when set on the edge of the 
grave it lay there for some time, and they seemed to 
be loath to let him down, "nor did I ever see so 
many weepers before." 

For the first time in Christian history churches 
came to be schooled in revivals. They learned then, 
as a new lesson, that people advance more at such 
seasons in their jjractical acquaintance with the 
Scriptures and in a true doctrinal understanding of 
the methods of grace than in a whole ministry 
besides, though it cover many years. They ate with 
the Bible in their hands, and slept with it in their 
bosoms. It taught churches that are "contentedly 

[123] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

unsuecessf ul' ' that extra efforts and extra measures 
in some form are indispensable to the adequate 
prosecution of a revival. 

The " Great Awakening' ' turned upon the ques- 
tion of the employment of an unconverted ministry. 
Incredible as it seems, Whitefield could give it as 
his opinion that many, perhaps most, that preached 
were unconverted men. And Edwards was the first 
to vindicate effectually the principle of "the church 
for Christians/ ' which gave to it at once a vigorous 
and independent life of its own. Thousands of 
churches are today walking in their purity and 
strength, enjoying peace and separate from the 
world, without ever knowing at what a price their 
liberty was obtained. 

Determined to stand or fall by his principles, 
new even to himself, by an almost unanimous vote 
of the church he was dethroned, but his fall became 
his mightiest victory. He was the loser and yet the 
winner. Having become so well known and his 
church so distinguished by his labors during the 
great revival, the eyes not only of this country, but 
even of Scotland, were drawn toward his position, 
which his mighty pen had established to remain as 
long as the sun and the moon endureth. 

Relegated to obscurity, and becoming a mission- 
ary to the Stockbridge Indians, in a room six feet 
by nine, having a wife and ten children, of whom but 
one was provided for by marriage, to support upon 
a salary of about thirty-five dollars a year (let us 
be thankful that he was assured in the contract that 

[124] 



THE GREAT AWAKENING 

it was to be "lawful money"), and one hundred 
sleigh-loads of fire-wood, of which the Indians were 
to furnish eighty and the white settlers twenty, he 
composed the highest production of the American 
mind, which ranks him "with the brightest lumin- 
aries," as Robert Hall says, "of the church, not 
excluding any country or any age since the apos- 
tolic," and which it is interesting to note as to its 
main purport no writer has had the hardihood to 
attack, which is today unanswered, and which will 
probably remain unanswerable to all generations. 
The English reviewer who said that Edwards on 
"the Will" was based on a mistake, but that he 
was unable to point it out, reminds one of the reit- 
erated claim of the French that Wellington was 
really defeated at Waterloo, only he could not be 
made to see it. 

Too poor to buy clean paper, thirty-five hundred 
dollars in debt, he wrote his unperishable thoughts 
on the margins of newspapers and upon the backs 
of church notices and requests for prayers sent up 
to his pulpit; for example, in behalf of a husband on 
the death of his wife, and upon the paper patterns 
which his wife and daughters had used for making 
fans and collars, which they sold through Mr. Brom- 
field in Boston to help pay the family expenses. 

The conspicuousness of Edwards will now at 
length be perhaps more adequately seen if we gain a 
clear conception of the striking fact that, as we now 
understand and use the word "revivals," which are 
made manifest by a certain social sympathy, and 

[125] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

result in multitudinous conversions, their initiation 
was at the hands of our own early New England 
ministry. The genesis of revivals is American. 
From here they were carried into Scotland, England, 
and with uncommon power during the year of grace 
into Ireland. 

Methodism is indebted to Puritanism, as Pro- 
fessor Allen in his able contribution to the series of 
"American Religious Leaders " so significantly 
shows, for its well known feature of revivals. And 
the same dispassionate writer is authority for the 
judgment, in which every student of the subject 
must concur, that the "Great Awakening 7 ' begin- 
ning at Northampton was a theological conviction, 
which first took shape in Edwards' mind, a belief 
in the immediate action of the divine Spirit upon 
the human soul. 

Should a star of the first magnitude be blotted 
out of our sky, its beams, year after year, would 
descend upon us. So falls the influence still of 
President Edwards upon all those evangelical 
churches that today are allied in Christian work. 
There is not one of them, but is different from what 
it would have been except for him. The amplitude 
of the "Great Awakening" can undoubtedly best 
be seen in its true proportions by the amazing fact 
that a revival now of equal fruitfulness relative to 
our present population in the United States would 
result in the conversion of twelve million souls. 



[126] 



XII 
THE GREATEST REVIVAL 

When the Saviour shall call together his chosen, 
in the judgment of the great day, and the throngs 
shall come up before him clothed with white robes, 
having palms in their hands, who were gathered 
into the everlasting kingdom by the revival of 1857, 
their numbers will undoubtedly exceed those con- 
verted in any other equal period in all the earlier 
history of the work of the Spirit. 

Said St. John, as he touched the imagination 
of believers, "And I heard the number of them 
which were sealed, a hundred and forty and four 
thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel!" 
But who are these that fly as a cloud and as the 
doves to their windows? They are the four hundred 
thousand souls that in America alone, during a single 
winter, found refuge in Christ. If the joy of the 
angels sometimes heightens, and if they rejoice over 
a sinner that repenteth, the happiest year in heaven 
is probably marked 1858. 

It was called familiarly "The Great Revival." 
No man living or dead had ever seen anything like 
it, reaching so many people scattered over such a 
length and breadth of territory, appearing in so 
many denominations of Christians, leavening so 
many colleges, and influencing and penetrating so 

[127] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

many hearts. The whole land received the spiritual 
rain. 

Not less than one hundred and fifty meetings 
for prayer were held daily in New York and Brook- 
lyn, while in two hundred towns in New York State 
alone the Spirit seemed like a gentle wind to fill 
almost imperceptibly every part of the community 
at the same time. In over two thousand cities and 
villages, by actual count, in the United States, the 
flood of feeling which was gathering with the force 
of a mighty torrent seemed to swell. 

In some localities in the Middle and Eastern 
States the people seemed to rise by cities and com- 
munities to seek the Lord. In Philadelphia, where 
the meetings were solemn beyond description, there 
was one of those general uprisings of the human 
soul to the consciousness of religious want, and ten 
thousand converts, a myriad, pressed into the King- 
dom, three thousand of them belonging to one 
denomination. It was in this city that those 
memorable sermons were preached by Dudley A. 
Tyng in Jaynes Hall, before audiences of over five 
thousand persons, that resulted in more conversions 
than in any other instance in all our Christian annals, 
except one. Here, too, were the largest meetings 
that at that time had ever been assembled for the 
simple purpose of prayer. Five thousand persons 
meeting daily, making the place a Bochim, afforded 
a scene literally unprecedented and unparalleled in 
the history of any age in any city. 

In Providence such a time of religious interest 

[128] 



THE GREATEST REVIVAL 

had never before been known. More persons of 
both, sexes were engaged in religious inquiry than 
at any former period in the history of the State. 
The number of requests for prayer, on the table, was 
so great that the leader only looked at them with 
wonder, and did not attempt to read them. 

Never in the history of Lowell had the waters 
of life flowed so freely. At Manchester the silent, 
mysterious influence seemed to come almost visibly 
down upon the hearts of men, like the overshadow- 
ing of a cloud. In New Bedford, a city of twenty- 
four thousand people, twelve daily prayer meetings 
were sustained, with unabated interest, for three 
months. Christianity seemed to reach its true sum- 
mit level in one hundred and forty-seven towns in 
Massachusetts, where simultaneous revivals, the 
greatest in their respective histories, were in 
progress. 

Yale, like most of the other colleges, was blessed 
in a manner never before known, and the work in 
Phillips Academy was altogether unexampled. Some 
of our educational centres were so stirred that very 
few students were left who had not turned toward 
the gate at the head of the way. At Canandaigua 
two hundred and forty academy students united 
with the churches of the town. 

Waiters in hotels held prayer meetings at ten 
o'clock at night among the tables that they had 
served, being forbidden by their calling to meet 
earlier thus together. The work among firemen in 
different cities became someway a distinctive fea- 

[129] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

ture among the operations of the divine Spirit. On 
the doors of stores and of the largest commercial 
houses in Newark would be found a placard, "Will 
open at the close of the prayer meeting." 

If the revival was more marked in some parts 
of the country than in others, it cannot be said of 
any large portion of the land that it was exempt. 
The fervor of awakened religious interest became 
intense, and spread everywhere, penetrating every 
nook and corner of the great republic. It pleased 
Him who must needs go through Samaria, to pass 
through our land, visiting Dubuque, where the num- 
bers converted were beyond all precedent and 
Virginia, where in a circuit of several counties only 
one church existed that did not ask and receive an 
outpouring of the Spirit upon the dry fleece. 

The extent and pervasiveness of this unusual 
work, which seemed, like a mighty tide, insensibly 
but powerfully to keep rising higher and higher, 
reaching all classes of persons, is still further 
demonstrable. The members of the legislature of the 
State of New York commenced meeting for prayer 
at half -past eight o'clock in the morning at the 
rooms of the Court of Appeals, which stood opposite 
the Senate chamber. "When in the fifth daily meet- 
ing the voice of supplication and praise was heard at 
the Capitol in Albany, the number present filled two 
rooms. At Washington, where five daily prayer 
meetings were held, Senators and Representatives 
met to arrange for the formation of a Congressional 
union prayer meeting. 

[130] 



THE GREATEST REVIVAL 

Little did that solitary man, Jeremiah Calvin 
Lanphier know, — with whom we have been in pleasant 
correspondence, and whom, we have visited, kneel- 
ing alone on the floor of a room where he himself 
had been moved to appoint a meeting for prayer, — 
that the day was breaking that should be gilded by 
the rays of a brighter sun than had ever shone on 
the moral and religious world before. It was in the 
upper room at the corner of Fulton and Ann Streets 
in New York City, now hallowed and renowned as 
the birthplace of the Fulton Street prayer meeting. 

Mr. Lanphier, a layman, had been employed by 
the North Dutch Church, which had been kept mys- 
teriously free from the controversies of the day, to 
act as its visiting missionary, and entered upon his 
duties July 1, 1857. " Going my rounds in the per- 
formance of my duty," he writes, "one day as I 
was walking along the streets the idea was sug- 
gested to my mind that an hour of prayer, from 
twelve to one o'clock, would be beneficial to busi- 
ness men." 

Arrangements were accordingly made, and at 
twelve o'clock, noon, on the tw T enty-third day of 
September, 1857, the door of the third-story lecture- 
room was thrown open. At half-past twelve the 
step of a solitary individual was heard upon the 
stairs, thus indicating that Mr. Lanphier passed the 
first half of the first prayer-meeting hour alone in 
a place now more honored than the palace of any 
earthly monarch. To the first meeting three persons 
at length came ; the next week, six ; the next, twenty ; 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

the next meeting was held in the middle lecture- 
room on the second floor; and soon all three rooms, 
one above another, were filled. The meetings were 
then held daily instead of weekly. Presently the 
very passage-way became choked with men seeking 
entrance, and the initial public demonstration of the 
great national awakening that was to follow thus 
projected its tidal or tenth wave upon these shores, 
which was to roll its mighty surge onward until the 
sweep of an overwhelming flood should bear away 
with resistless energy every obstacle that opposed 
its progress. 

Here began a movement which, far more than 
the opening of China or the reconquest of India, or 
the laying of the Atlantic telegraphic cable, has 
rendered its epoch memorable, which without exag- 
geration may be emphatically styled, in the religious 
world, the chief event of the century, and in which 
occurred the nearest reproduction of the scenes of 
Pentecost that has been witnessed since the cloven 
tongues, like as of fire, sat upon the heads of the 
apostles. Starting in that upper room where a single 
believer exercised a faith which is unsurpassed in all 
our annals, there sprang up a line of prayer meet- 
ings which are the wonder of our history. During 
the latter part of that winter rarely could a traveller 
pass the lecture-room of any evangelical church in 
the evening and not find it lighted up for prayer or 
preaching service. At the time of meeting the 
church-bells, summoning their willing worshippers, 
would answer each other's echo across the land. 

[132] 



THE GREATEST REVIVAL 

From the Atlantic seaboard there was such a line of 
prayer meetings, stretching even beyond the two 
great rivers, that wherever a Christian in going 
westward might break his journey, he could find, on 
any evening of the week, a crowded prayer meeting 
and the mind of the whole community filled with 
deep religious solemnity. 



While this article was preparing, thinking there was no other 
way we could honor ourselves so much. Mrs. Hill and I visited New 
York, and, at No. 130 E. Sixteenth Street, called upon the gentle, 
venerable saint whose spirit the Lord stirred up, making him a 
chosen vessel to bear the name of Jesus to myriads. We were deeply 
affected and profoundly and memorably impressed. We found this 
man of boundless soul in apartments which by reason of long 
familiarity he could still freely use, notwithstanding the fact that 
by extreme age his sight is nearly eclipsed. Here is a man whom God 
touched. He shall shine as the stars. He prayed, and the spices of 
God's garden flowed out. With feelings of awe and with full hearts, 
at his suggestion, we three joined hands and sang together a hymn 
in which he led. Standing thus, we repeated the Lord's Prayer. It 
seemed holy ground. This good-bye was like the benediction that 
follows after prayer. 



[*33] 



XIII 

WHAT MADE THE GREATEST REVIVAL IN 

HUMAN HISTORY 

On the fourteenth day of October, 1857, the com- 
mercial distress which had been gathering for some 
time in this country reached its crisis, and the very 
foundations of the whole financial world were felt to 
be moving. It was the most convulsing temporal 
calamity which this land of ours has ever known. 
Business houses were everywhere toppling to the fall, 
and the very earth beneath the feet of business men 
was palpably in libration. 

As in a time of earthquake, or wreck at sea, men 's 
hearts were failing them for fear, it w r as an evil day 
in which fortunes, great and small, which had been 
building during years of prosperity and quiet, were 
prostrated in an hour. 

Riches took to themselves wings. The wheels of 
industry stood still, and a pall of general gloom 
settled as with raven wing upon the spheres both of 
manufacture and of trade. 

The unemployed masses tramped the streets with 
banners demanding bread. All the sources of gain 
were dried up. Want pressed heavily, and nothing 
compares with hunger for bowing the spirit of haughty 
man. 

The winter was coming on. Pecuniary apprehen- 

[134] 



WHAT MADE THE GREATEST REVIVAL 

sion was universal. It was the sorest trial to which 
heads of families had ever been subjected. The whole 
nation felt helpless before God. 

And in the day of adversity, men consider. 
Churches that had been characterized by coldness and 
conformity to the world, and men running headlong 
in the reckless race for riches, whose greed of gain 
amounted almost to a mania, were forced into an 
acknowledgment of abject dependence upon a Divine 
Being. It was the last watch of the night, a season 
of unparalleled darkness. 

But the Sun of righteousness was about to rise. 
The time, the set time to favor Zion, had come. Men 
were so shaken in their positions that their religious 
sensibility awaked, the faith-faculty was stimulated 
and enlightened, and they at once became singularly 
susceptible to spiritual influences and to the impres- 
sions of religious truth. 

It must be admitted, however, that the general 
interruption of business was a condition rather than a 
cause of this glorious work of grace. It is a mistake 
to conclude that some visible means immediately pre- 
ceding a revival or contemporaneous with it is effectual 
in producing it. The Lord seemed determined that he 
would be inquired of by the house of Israel, and 
when they called, the Lord answered and heard. 

We note incidentally as one of the curiosities of 
history that the instrumentality employed in this day 
of God's power was radically unlike that ever em- 
ployed before in the entire history of the Christian 

[135] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

church. On the day of Pentecost Peter preached. In 
the rise of the Reformation Luther preached in words 
that shook the world. John Knox preached. The 
Great Awakening was produced by preaching, and 
its extent was limited strictly to those who could hear 
the joyful sound. George Whitefield blazed upon the 
New World like a meteor, and drew the world after 
him, and made a deep impression; but the moment 
he was gone the religious atmosphere went with him. 
It was only in the communities where Edwards 
preached as at Northampton and Enfield, that the 
people cried out in their distress of mind, and inquired 
of him while he was still speaking, taking hold of his 
apparel, "Are there few that be saved?" Samuel 
Davies, the Tennents, and John Wesley, preached. 
President Finney, our American Boanerges, whose 
labor during forty years among the churches was 
instrumental in more conversions than the ministra- 
tions of any man since Whitefield, preached. 

But in this revival, which stands without a 
parallel in the items of both extent and power, the 
instrumentalities employed were chiefly laic. No pro- 
fessional evangelist engaged in it. Indeed, many 
believed at the time that the day of great preachers' 
revivals had passed away with that of the mastery 
of single minds in general. The people became the 
preacher; and the very singularity of the new 
arrangement seemed to arrest attention, and by its 
freshness and originality to powerfully affect the 
mind. Here is a particular in which, as well as in 

[136] 



WHAT MADE THE GREATEST REVIVAL 

doctrine, the great revival of 1857 was an exact reac- 
tion from all earlier awakenings, which were those 
of eminent preachers. 

The protracted religious solemnities, now under 
review, did not seem man-made, but beautifully 
spontaneous. They had their rise in the heart of the 
church. Hitherto spiritual forces had engaged in 
Homeric warfare where the chieftains do the fighting ; 
but now, as in the terms of Stonewall Jackson's dying 
order, the infantry was advanced to the front rapidly. 

This revealed a power absolutely unknown to the 
churches. In the Edwardean revival, which was 
throughout a matter of ministers, it was a cause of 
complaint that the unordained believer would some- 
times testify. No conference-rooms were provided in 
the churches. A few did the work and felt all the 
reseponsibility, and have in history all the honor. 

But in this new day of God's power, no eloquent 
orator, no noted evangelist, no display of intellectual 
abilities, native or acquired, nothing to gratify a 
curious taste, stimulate a jaded imagination, or pander 
to itching ears, anywhere appeared. It seemed as 
though an agent, unseen by the natural eye, was 
operating upon the popular mind. 

The greatest revival in human history was 
produced by this prevalence of the Spirit. In neigh- 
borhoods entirely disconnected, an extraordinary 
sensation was occasioned by the feeling that God had 
appeared among them. The wind that bloweth where 
it listeth came, and the people breathed a new 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

inspiration. The Spirit of God seemed to bring over 
the public mind a peculiar atmosphere, which charged 
the whole region with a supernal and invisible aroma. 

Let me appeal to my reader: Didst thou ever 
experience or witness one of these times of refreshing 
when the gloom of unbelief fled away like the shadows 
of night before the rising sun? When the hearts of 
the most obdurate melted like wax before the fire? 
When it seemed only necessary to open the doors and 
windows of the church to let the general warmth 
come in, and to feel a little of the "spring"? When 
the kingdom of God was like an energetic and diffusive 
leaven, when a contagion of real earnestness was in 
the very air, and the crowded Christian meeting, with 
its pressure of speech and prayer, had a tenderness, 
solemnity, and obvious results which witnessed might- 
ily to the invincible power of all-conquering grace ? 

It is an incalculable privation to any Christian, 
particularly to a minister or Christian worker, never 
to have seen one of these harvest-times of souls, when 
there is a hearing ear, when the weight of eternal veri- 
ties is felt, and the public collective testimony of 
believers has a savor which no human art or eloquence 
can impart to words. 

A revival is thus, to one who has viewed it sym- 
pathetically, a different thing from a multiplication 
of insulated conversions. It is a solid spiritual entity. 
It is visible, ponderable, and effective. 

The chief factor in this revival was the spirit of 
prayer. God laid upon souls burdens. This is a 

[I3'8] 



WHAT MADE THE GREATEST REVIVAL 

different thing from the forms of petition. This dis- 
tinction every hearer has observed, either in his 
experience or in the community. The spirit of suppli- 
cation is not self-moved. It is given like the Holy 
Ghost. It is the spirit within us crying, "Abba, 
Father." Such prayer is always answered, for God 
is one, and by his outward providence co-operates with 
his Spirit within. 

The revival of 1857, furthermore, was the inev- 
itable result of interdenominational union, and in its 
time did more to promote religious fellowship than 
any influence that had then been felt since the voice of 
Jesus was heard praying that his disciples might be 
one, so that the world would believe in his Messiahship. 

The world has never yet discovered a surer sign 
of the grace of God than the manifest love that Chris- 
tians have for other Christians, simply because they 
are Christians. In this first successful attempt at 
Christian union, in all the annals of mankind, no con- 
troversial points were discussed. Persons who par- 
ticipated in the great prayer meetings were requested 
not to refer even to the denominaions to which they 
belonged. The banner over them was love. Conten- 
tions threatening the most disastrous consequences 
were quietly submerged in the great concerns of the 
soul and eternity. The joint power of the churches 
received a providential development and direction 
which was of incalculable importance to the welfare 
of the country, in its imminent trial in the Civil War. 

Besides its unprecedented fruitage, the revival of 
1857 leaves this sentiment inscribed upon our sky: 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

Besides the potency which each and all the denomin- 
ations have in their separate action, there is a special 
force in their unity and in the outward expression of 
that unity in some strong evangelistic labors for the 
salvation of those not already reached by the estab- 
lished means of grace. If the sheep are only inclosed 
in the fold of the Good Shepherd, it is of little import- 
ance whether they have been led through this gate or 
that door, or by the hand of bishop, presbyter, parent, 
fellow disciple, or Sundayschool teacher. 



[140] 



XIV 
SOME ELEMENTS OF MR. MOODY'S POWER 

The strongest of men was once addressed with the 
inquiry. "Tell me I pray thee wherein thy great 
strength lieth." In analyzing the power of the 
greatest of modern Evangelists I find it first in 
his dramatization of Scripture. Some persons 
present never witnessed a stronger piece of word- 
painting than that in which the energetic mind 
of the Evangelist depicted the effort of the widow 
who had the cruse of oil to borrow vessels "not 
a few." Again we are made to sit in our places 
and see Peter and Paul as they go on their several 
evening walks together, out froni Jerusalem, to 
review the garden scene at Gethsemane, the place 
for Crucifixion at Calvary, and the spot whence 
occurred the ascension at Bethany. Meanwhile, we 
hear Peter with a pathetic voice narrate to Paul just 
how those sacred events transpired. The room grows 
still as if it were unoccupied. Mr. Moody is an artist. 
In speaking English it is a great thing to have "the 
unerring first touch." He makes sure his imagination 
is sanctified and then turns it loose. His genius 
beautifies the things that are near at hand. He sees 
pictures where others say there is nothing. Others 
have the same chance, but not the same ability. The 
word-picture, never-to-be-forgotten, which he inci- 
dentally made of himself at thirteen, sorrowful with 

[Mi] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

his first homesickness, was done with so few strokes 
that they could be counted. Others have been just 
as homesick, but are not such strong and rapid artists. 
They deal in heavy narration ; he in description. He 
has a preaching nature. He first interests his audi- 
ence. He does not give an argument and then give an 
illustration, as most preachers do, thus going over the 
ground twice. The illustration is the argument. It is 
a difficult doctrine stated concretely. 

II. Mr. Moody has great reserve power. He 
can of a sudden call up unexpected strength. When I 
was a pastor in Lynn he had a meeting only for 
women. At the crisis, as he was passing Calvary-point, 
near the close of his sermon, when an expression is to 
be taken on which all our prayers are hanging, an 
unfortunate and unforseen episode intervenes. It 
occurs in a conspicuous place in the audience, and 
under peculiarly trying circumstances. Glances of 
regret are exchanged upon the platform. A neigh- 
boring minister whispered "Defeated." But Mr. 
Moody has many resources. Some other truth must 
suddenly be made instrumental. For ordinary per- 
sons the episode would be one to be talked over at 
home and deplored. Useless as it now is, he finishes 
the paragraph, merely to show that he keeps his place, 
and then starts right out on a new line, dissociated 
with the past, but fraught with a new determination. 
He falls back on God, and comes up re-enforced. In 
the privacy of the hotel he remarked that his exhaus- 
tion was as great as after four or five ordinary services. 

[142] 



SOME ELEMENTS GF MR. MOODY'S POWER 

He had his reward. Sixty-eight persons arose to 
pronounce themselves for Christ. 

III. Mr. Moody is manifestly a manly man. We 
want to know something about the individual who is 
preaching to us. As if to furnish this material, uncon- 
sciously he has allowed just the right revelation to be 
made of himself at Northfield. While he is reviewing 
his school we are reviewing him. He has, doubtless, 
possessed the same inherent manliness all along, but it 
is better known now, and he gets strength by it. His 
treatment of his mother, his delightful family life, his 
unselfish work for boys, his living in the sight of all 
the people, accentuate w^hat he says. If a man can 
thus live as Mr. Moody does, and as President Garfield 
did, it does augment him with the people. Further- 
more, by much travel, his provincialisms are gone. He 
is a broad man. He is familiar with the whole re- 
ligious life of Christendom. He has capacity. Now, 
grace means a gift. It must be received. Thinking 
of the grace of God and then of some who would be 
recipients, one is led to exclaim, " There shall not be 
room enough to receive it." 

IV. Mr. Moody's strength came upon him with 
his consecration. He was born in Northfield, Febru- 
ary 5, 1837. As a boy among boys he was always at 
the head, leading them with unequalled zest in all 
their sports. He was admitted to the Mt, Vernon 
Church, Boston, May 4, 1856. He soon became very 
prominent in Christian work and his whole soul 
seemed to glow with the evangelistic spirit. He was 
not content with ordinary agencies but essayed new 

[143] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

and untried methods to extend the Redeemer's king- 
dom. In August, 1862, he was married to Miss Emma 
C. Re veil, whose brother has become the famous pub- 
lisher. But pre-eminent power seemed to attend him 
from the moment that he stepped boldly out with un- 
hesitating and unreserved consecration and vowed that 
he would ' ' give God all his time. ' ' People of all ranks 
on both sides the sea have studied him to find the 
hiding of his power. Samson did all his prodigies 
with the increment of strength that came on him by 
gift of the Spirit. As a Nazarite, however, he had 
never injured the fineness of his muscular power by 
wine or strong drink. At the start he was a strong 
man, as men average, and so were John the Baptist 
and St. Paul and Luther and Moody. The Spirit of 
God likes to co-operate with an efficient leader. This 
was felt by the hosts of Israel when they cried, ' ' The 
sword of the Lord and of Gideon. ' ' 



f J 44j 



XV 
MEMORY COMFORTING SORROW 

In choosing for himself the hour to give the 
sign to parting friends, James Montgomery tells us 
that " night is the time for death. " Early Sunday 
morning, December 28th, the chimes of Harvard 
Church, Brookline, broke out upon the air with the 
notes, "When He cometh, when He cometh to make 
up His jewels." "He has come, He has come," was 
remarked with intensest feeling by one to another 
at the Hotel Coolidge, across the street from the 
church, the family's winter home, where Helen 
Grinnell Mears had just died. The requiem appeared 
personal from the fact that when she, at nine years 
of age, united with her father's church this text was 
named upon her, "And they shall be mine, saith 
the Lord of Hosts, in that day when I make up my 
jewels." She looked so wholesome and seemed so 
to radiate health and happiness that the most of her 
friends had no knowledge of the fact that her trans- 
lation was imminent. 

"But when the sun in all his state 

Illumed the Eastern skies, 
She passed thro' glory 's morning gate 

And walked in Paradise." 

She had in her ancestry four Mayflower Pil- 
grims, five Colonial Governors, and seven Revolu- 
tionary Patriots; she was a direct descendant of 

[MS] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

John Eliot, who with "much sweet affection 
preached Jesus Christ to the Indians as their only 
Saviour;" of Deacon Samuel Chapin, who laid the 
beginnings of Springfield, Mass., and of Hon. J. B. 
Grinnell, who founded the clean, beautiful model 
college city named after him where, upon the campus, 
stands today, beyond the great river, the Mary 
Grinnell Mears cottage for young women, named 
in honor of his daughter, the mother of "Our 
Helen, " who had the qualities that go with the 
blood. She was obviously well born. She stood in 
a very remarkable line. Heredity and early associa- 
tion did much for her. James Russell Lowell speaks 
of the impression made upon him by meeting un- 
expectedly this epitaph upon a headstone, "She was 
so pleasant." The instant those words came to my 
attention, unaided by anything in my surroundings, 
I thought of Helen Mears. Her friends, who are a 
host, testify to her "sweet and radiant personality, ' ' 
and of "her great capacity for making others 
happy. I do not know of any person I ever met who 
was nicer to have about. She was always so sunny and 
cheerful and sweet. She was radiant with life, happi- 
ness and love; keen in her enjoyment of them; glad 
to give herself, her time, her glorious voice, whole- 
heartedly to others." 

The wife of a New York physician asserts, "To 
me she will always live as a perfect half -open 'moss 
rose' touched by the rays of the spring sun, which 
illuminates and vitalizes the petals, until they burst 
open, and exhale the fragrance of a perfect spring 

[146] 



MEMORY COMFORTING SORROW 

day." At her birth nature conferred upon her the 
outright gift of song. When three and a half years 
of age the Worcester Telegram says, ' ' She sang sweetly 
and prettily " at a children's service in the Piedmont 
church. She thus early voiced a prophecy of her 
subsequent life, "How to be a sunbeam. " This she 
more fully demonstrated later. Within a few days 
of each other she had twenty-two invitations to 
sing in ten cities and towns. She was alto soloist 
in the far-famed vested choir of Oberlin, with its 
one hundred and sixty selected trained voices. 

She was born at the time of her father's bril- 
liant pastorate in Worcester, and was received into 
his church at Cleveland. Like Samuel in Scripture, 
she seemed to be one of those rare natures that need 
no conversion. During her father's ministry at 
Albany her early and chief professional victories 
were won. Around the beautiful young life there was 
a bow of great promise. She was like snow in the 
truthful purity of her heart. On the day of the sum- 
mons, the choir in Essex, which Miss Mears, with 
her passionate love of music and with her rich voice, 
that she always had the strength to support, had 
repeatedly led, were expecting to use Christmas 
music, but Sabbath morning, finding themselves so 
heartsick and grief -stricken, they were wholly inca- 
pacitated for any such service. The pall that fell 
over the town was affecting to visitors. 

No young woman ever had a happier, even if 
short, career. Her path always lay in the sun. She 

[147] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

looked forward to passing her life in a dream of 
happiness. 

The family that enjoyed the rare beauty of her 
life in the home now knows what it is to have sacred 
things in it. She gave it atmosphere. By the law 
of association the house is not filled with furniture 
and objects of art. It is filled with memories. Who 
can look into the artistic music room, specially built 
for her in an elaborate addition to the summer resi- 
dence, and experience no suggestion of a contralto 
singer, now gone to join the choir invisible, for the 
voice that once through spacious halls the "soul of 
music shed" is here mute. As a piece of music ends 
upon the key, so with a strange and beautiful pro- 
vision of dying grace she came round to the prevail- 
ing note to which her life was keyed, and as the 
event approached no fear of death appeared at all, 
and she went singing well-nigh to the gates of Para- 
dise. As she has had a few days there already, they 
must have been made wonderful by that flood of 
melody, that august oratorio, which shall ever rise 
up, like the sound of many waters, and by having 
her part assigned in a New Song which no one can 
learn but those who are redeemed. All service is not 
done here. Forever will The Messiah have a Halle- 
lujah Chorus, and one of her admirers growing 
enthusiastic exclaimed that if there were choirs in 
heaven Helen Mears would be a leader there as she 
had been accorded the place of soloist here. Her 
life was all of it preparative. She had not done, 
at the end, or shall we say at the beginning, when 

[148] 



MEMORY COMFORTING SORROW 

she was added to the church of the redeemed in 
Heaven, all that it was in her to do. 

"It singeth low in every heart, 

We hear it, each and all, 
A song of those who answer not 

However we may call. 

"They throng the silence of the heart, 

We see them as of yore, 
The kind, the true, the brave, the sweet, 

Who walk with us no more." 



I>493 



XVI 
EARTHLY MELODIES AND THE NEW SONG 

The only human character to whom our Saviour 
expressly likens himself, died singing. Moses sang 
as he went up into Nebo's lonely mountain and 
passed out of sight "with his singing robes around 
him." Our own Redeemer sang just before His 
death. When the eloquent Edward Irving was dying 
he gathered up his strength and sang the Shepherd's 
Song, "I will dwell in the house of the Lord for- 
ever." Only a heart of marble could be unre- 
sponsive to that last touch of pathos when Helen 
Grinnell Mears took up, sweetly, her swan song and 
thus entered the New Jerusalem, where praise is 
ceaseless and where discord never comes. As she 
had lived so she died. Her nature and her training 
appeared in plain evidence, when with the words of 
her melody, as distinct as the stars on a clear night, 
she entered a world that is full of music, with a song 
upon her lips, as if she was already one of the hea- 
venly host, and, like Bunyan's pilgrim, already in 
Heaven before she had come at it. She allied music 
and the heavenly life. Her voice seemed to come 
direct from the soul. Show me character and de- 
meanor like hers, where the ruling passion is strong 
in death, and I will show you a kind and a pure heart 
and a generous nature. Making melody on high 
divine themes, is the noblest in which any being can 

[ISO] 



EARTHLY MELODIES AND THE NEW SONG 

engage. As some musical characters incline to 
express deep emotion in song, so when night was 
drawing down around her its sable curtain her 
gentle nature moved instinctively to melody for ex- 
pression. It was life's Even-song. The doctrine of 
election is contested in theology, but nature offers 
no explanations and lavishly bestows upon one mem- 
ber of a commuity what labor unaided could never 
acquire. 

Nature's Way 

Whatever be the fact about poets, it is singu- 
larly true that singers are born, not made. There 
are no self-made singers. Their talent is a direct 
gift. "The hand that made us is divine." Instruc- 
tion can only aid what is already there. 

A magnetic young woman, that truly expresses 
the spirit of a hymn or oratorio, with intellectual 
appreciation and superb voice, becomes an inter- 
preter of the Divine mind and an active aggressive 
factor in the services of the church. This is specially 
discernible in the melodies that have the flavor of 
sacred association. There is a tenderness in her art 
that melts. Catching the spirit of the words, this is 
felt in a peculiar sympathy of voice. A review of 
the career of this talented young singer suggests 
unlimited possibilities for consecrated song. It was 
a fine wish expressed for her, by one who discerned 
her "unerring first touch," that she might become 
as distinguished in the choir loft as her father was 
in the pulpit. When such a wish comes true, a 

[i5i] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

consecrated young singer, with talents of the first 
order will have a "Divine Call." "When the burnt 
offering began, the song began." They are on the 
same level. This "sweet songstress of the National 
Congress of Mothers" had her public work and rec- 
ognition as well as her father, Dr. David 0. Mears, 
in his distinguished ministry, and as well as her 
mother, an administrative officer in very many 
organizations that have claimed her interests. Her 
fine lineage is traced to John Eliot, whose transla- 
tion of the Scriptures, with "Up Biblum God," on 
its title page, no Indian on this continent, nor on 
the face of the earth, can read. It can never lead 
another poor Indian to the gate at the head of the 
way. Its work is over. Yet John Eliot is a living 
force. 

So of her. She has produced more Christian 
feeling since her death than in any similar period. 
What is the secret of her influence and of her incon- 
testable popularity? 

It was temperamental. She was winsome, 
buoyant, animated, full of sunshine and hope. Her 
abilities brought her to leadership and her genial dis- 
position to co-operation, to combination if you please 
to call it so, as shown in her conduct of the great 
choir of eighty-five voices at one of the large mis- 
sionary summer conferences at Northfield. This life 
grows upon me. She attuned it to service; so the 
world welcomed her. If her story could be written 
out with entire veracity it would become an inspira- 
tion. This double-gifted child of song had the power 

[152] 



EARTHLY MELODIES AND THE NEW SONG 

to awaken taste and a strong musical impulse in 
others. 

It must be that those who love and cultivate 
music here will have pre-eminence in a loftier 
service, causing "the Joy of Jerusalem to be heard 
even afar off." We certainly know that in Upper 
Zion, a choir of angels first led the song and then 
afterwards all took part. Her home-going was 
serenely beautiful, and the light of Heaven streamed 
in upon the opening way. There was no long dying. 
She made much of music on her way. Other's tones 
were subdued by the words, "Hark, Hark, I hear 
Helen!" In perfect tranquillity, in the bloom, hey- 
day and climax of her career, she passed, with little 
premonition, from the melodies of earth to the songs 
of Heaven. Unless her relatives are much deceived, 
she did not taste death. Of all the twenty-four, she 
seemed to elect the quiet hour for her departure to 
the world of spirits. Those on the streets late on Sat- 
urday night had found their way home. The earliest 
worshippers for the Sabbath were still awaiting the 
dawn. When the earth was stillest, having nobly 
lived on earth, and being honored with an early call 
into the King's presence to wear a crown, she was 
prompt to keep her appointment with the Lord of 
the Sabbath, as if assigned to take part in a matin- 
song. 

"The tides of music's golden sea 

Are setting toward eternity." 



[153] 



XVII 
THE GIFT OF THE BOTTOM DOLLAE 

Wendell Phillips used to say that the main factor 
in civilization is the dollar left over out of the week's 
wages after the expenses of the family have been paid. 
That dollar means music and pictures and travel. It 
opens the way to free choice and gives a chance of self- 
expression. This is the dollar that lifts life out of its 
monotony and drudgery and is usually about the only 
one that leaves a distinctive memory. More than 
all other wages together this dollar shows the differ- 
ences in people. This is the dollar that has built the 
college thus far and it is to this "dollar left over" 
that it can look alone in future. If it be true that 
"money talks" here is a dollar that is conspicuously 
vocal. It voices the spirit. It tells what we love and 
how much we are willing to sacrifice for it. It inter- 
prets the purpose and life of a John Harvard, an 
Elihu Yale, a Carter, a Durant, a Williston, a Lenox, 
a Dodge, a Peter Cooper, or a Frederick Marquand, 
and sometimes after a man's death reveals a sacred 
life-long determination or ambition. When money 
talks no one comes back with the flippant remark that 
talk is cheap. Money talks and it alone can tell when 
one has earned the right to recommend a cause to 
others. It is one of the most disappointing things 
about us that we try to put only into words what 
would be better expressed by that which really talks. 

[154] 



THE GIFT OF THE BOTTOM DOLLAR 

Money is about the only thing that can talk when a 
certain stage has been reached in considering the case 
for example of the poor brethren, for you certainly 
would not then propose to give them three cheers. 
The romance of Grinnell College presents a primitive 
scene in which money talks. Discussion by word of 
mouth had reached its limits. Just as it is no great dis- 
advantage that so little is known of the life of Dante, 
as the man is in his work and the quality of his soul 
and the character of his genius are stamped on what we 
know he did, so a single deed will reveal a character. 
The act that raised one advocate of Grinnell College 
to his permanent niche in our Hall of Fame was 
achieved at a conference of those who early favored 
the higher education in Iowa and "the dollar" must 
have had all the marks of ' ' the main factor in civiliza- 
tion," coming as it did from a Home Missonary on a 
salary of $400 a year. His father had been a Senator 
from Maine, had received letters from President Jef- 
ferson on matters of state and had held moreover a 
commission which is to go to the museum of Grinnell 
College, signed by Samuel Adams, who, like Jefferson, 
signed the Declaration of Independence, and who did 
more than any other patriot to set in -motion the wheels 
of the American Revolution. 

When money talks and its utterance keeps on 
echoing while substantially two generations rise and 
fall and then bids fair to go on forever, the occasion 
becomes an interesting matter for historical study. 
Dr. George F. Magoun, first President of the College 
and officially related to it when located in Davenport, 

[155] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

wrote me over his signature "Your father laid upon 
the table of the Moderator of the Association, after 
debate, the first silver dollar given for the college, 
saying, 'Mr. Moderator, we have talked College long 
enough, it is time to begin to give, and make sacrifies 
for it.' It was 'The dollar of our daddies' and ought 
to have been sacredly kept as a memorial. When they 
began to talk of putting their hands into their own 
shallow pockets the impulse seized him to make the 
first contribution, and rising from his seat in the 
little old Davenport church and advancing to the 
Moderator's table, he exclaimed, 'Brother Moderator, 
the time has come to act for the creation of a college 
in Iowa. I will make my first contribution now,' and 
laid a silver dollar, on the table. The rest of the As- 
sociation followed suit, but that silver dollar of his, — 
how your mother loved to remember it ! — was the first 
foundation in gifts for the College. ' ' The parenthesis 
is a nail fastened by the master of assemblies, for the 
wife of Rev. J. J. Hill remembered the gift and at- 
tested it, which would be sufficient evidence alone to 
substantiate it, and Magoun and Hill were brothers- 
in-law and Magoun, soon after the gift spent a week in 
Hill's earliest home in Iowa,* and knew the items of 
familiar family history of which this was always one. 
In that standard treatise on seed sowing in Iowa, pub- 
lished a score of years ago while many were still living 
who were witnesses of the occurrence, this same his- 
torian of early days asserts, a committee on location 
having been appointed that named Davenport "at a 



*Asa Turner and His Times, pp. 250-254. 

[156] 



THE GIFT OF THE BOTTOM DOLLAR 

meeting held there June, 1846, this was unanimously 
approved. Rev. James J. Hill observing that the time 
had come to give as well as consult had asked the privi- 
lege of being the first donor to the college and laid a 
silver dollar upon the Chairman's table.' ' When the 
Articles of Incorporation went to public record they 
were in the writing of Dr. A. B. Robbins who acted 
as Chairman of the Board of Trustees for twenty 
years. He was one of the originals in everything that 
pertained to the College and is shown by the records 
to have been present at the earliest meetings. He has 
affirmed to me, that the statement which was published 
during his life, by President Magoun was authentic 
and his statements would have been published at the 
time except that he said that he expected to publish 
them himself. But he died suddenly with all his music 
in him. His historical papers are in my keeping in 
which he with re-iteration states the fact we are review- 
ing as he does for example at "The Commemoration of 
the Fifty Years Pastorate of Dr. Salter, "* where he re- 
fers to "big brother Hill" and "that dollar, the first 
toward the endowment of the first Iowa College, ' ' and 
the statement was made in the presence of two original 
trustees, present also like him at the early meeting, 
who would have questioned its historicity, had it not 
been indisputable. Both Charles Aldrich, the founder 
of the Historical Department of Iowa, and Edgar R. 
Harlan, his able successor, have ranked Dr. William 
Salter as "a natural historian." Any item of history 
' ' so appealed to his attention that he drew it into and 



* April 12, 1896, page 43. 

[157] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

retained it within his memory. " Both Dr. Salter and 
Dr. Ephraim Adams, two of the Apostles of Education 
in Iowa, have " taken in hand to set forth, in order, 
a declaration of these things, which are most surely 
believed among us, as they from the beginning were 
eye witnesses and ministers of the word, and had 
perfect understanding of all things from the very first 
that we might know the certainty of those things" 
in which they were participants. Speaking of Rev. 
Erastus Ripley and Rev. J. J. Hill, Dr. Salter, to 
whom Charles Aldrich ' ' accorded the highest place as 
a critic," says "Both held an honored place in the 
work of founding Iowa College. Mr. Ripley was the 
best classical scholar among us and Mr. Hill con- 
tributed the first dollar to its foundation." (Old 
People's Psalm, p. 12). At a regular meeting of the 
Board of Trustees July 6, 1886, a minute was passed, 
which is officially signed by the Secretary, which 
memorialized "the Rev. J. J. Hill, the donor of the 
first dollar to Iowa College." Dr. Ephraim Adams, 
who wrote the standard history of The Iowa Band, 
refers (p. 125) to Mr. Hill as "the one who gave the 
first dollar to the College." And in a public address 
at Commencement a quarter of a century ago, with 
other original trustees present who would know the 
fact, in accepting a picture of Mr. Hill for the Library, 
said that he gave the first dollar to found the College, 
and the next year too in public address at Com- 
mencement he refers to "that first dollar given by our 
lamented Brother Hill" and to "the Board of Trus- 

[158] 



THE GIFT OF THE BOTTOM DOLLAR 

tees first elected on the tenth of June, 1846."* This 
occurs in an official statement for the Trustees. The 
removal of the College from Davenport to the highest 
ground between the two great rivers reconditioned 
everything. In the new contingent of Trustees Hon. 
J. B. Grinnell was the most conspicuous character and 
he continued a Trustee for thirty years and he leaves 
this record,! "Rev. J. J. Hill of the Iowa Band put 
the first dollar in the Treasury."! The first teacher 
in our high-altitude college at Grinnell, Dr. Leonard F. 
Parker, specialist in history, a distinguished educator, 
in an address on "The Founders of the College" at 
the Jubilee Exercises June, 1898, gives this verdict, 
"Iowa College was founded when James Jeremiah 
Hill laid his dollar on the table of the Congregational 
Association (the first dollar ever given for Iowa Col- 
lege) and said: 'Now appoint a committee to take 
care of it.' That committee was the first Board 
of Trustees." This is the finding too of Dr. 
J. H. T. Main, President of the College in his 
study of "The Iowa Band and Iowa College," "The 
financial history of Iowa College began when Rev. J. 



* Inauguration of President Gates, pp. 6-7. 

f Men and Events of Forty Years, p. 326. 

t The gift of this Bottom Dollar, lingering lovingly in the mem- 
ory of a son of the giver, undoubtedly occasioned the incident recorded, 
pages 132, 133, in Durand's "Joseph Ward of Dakota," which recites 
that the members of the Yale Dakota Band brought with them from 
the East a silver dollar, which had been sent to Dakota as the first 
dollar toward the founding of the first college in that new country at 
Yankton. Rev. James L. Hill, D.D., of Salem, Mass.. was the donor. 
The South Dakota Band held a meeting in Boston and Dr. Hill, saying 
that a college would inevitably be the outcome of their work, handed 
them the first dollar toward it. An account of this was printed in 
"The Advance." Later Rev. W. B. D. Gray brought the dollar East, 
saying that it was the first dollar given to the college, and was found 
in President Ward's desk after his death. Dr. Hill has a certificate 
signed by Mr. Gray, and President Warren, testifying to these facts. 



[159] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

J. Hill, throwing a large silver dollar on the table, 
said 'I give one dollar for the founding of a Christian 
College in Iowa. Appoint your Trustees to care for 
that dollar. ' ' ' And in entire consistency with this is 
the reply of the lamented Dr. E. W. Clark, one of the 
most exact and useful of all the Trustees, to the ques- 
tion in the Grinnell Herald of Nov. 29, 1910, when a 
year's subscription was given to the person first giving 
a correct answer to ten questions, the last requiring 
the names of the men who first laid the foundation of 
Iowa College. In his Pilgrims in Iowa as reported in 
The Register and Leader of Dec. 25, 1910, Dr. Truman 
0. Douglass, acknowledged authority on early ecclesi- 
astical history in Iowa, reviewing the planting time 
of churches and the College awards this honor : — 
1 ' The Rev. J. J. Hill who gave the first dollar to Grin- 
nell College was the founder of seven churches." 
" Again the story of Harvard with its pewter plates 
and Yale with its books repeated itself and the Puri- 
tan Spirit had a local habitation and a name in the 
rich Commonwealth of Iowa," says Dr. Lucius 0. 
Baird, District Secretary of the American Missionary 
Association. "When James J. Hill put down on the 
table one dollar to found this College of Christian 
education. ' ' 

The world likes a man who does things. The act 
was just suited to the magic of the moment and to the 
spirit and purpose of the meeting. It struck the popu- 
lar ear and caught a quick response from a vibrant 
auditory. Those of us who have often seen all of the 
men who were then known to be present think of them 

[160] 



THE GIFT OF THE BOTTOM DOLLAR 

as we last saw them. No, no, this was before we were 
born, and all the sharers in the event were distinctly 
young. Far down the gallery of College History 
hangs another picture. It is a Dubuque scene. Only 
young women are delineated. It is at a meeting of the 
General Association of Iowa and in the second largest 
church in the state. The telegraph had only demon- 
strated its practicability the year the Immortal Eleven 
went to Iowa, and in a day when bridges, railroads 
and telephones were lacking, it was said to be worth 
a year of toil to go up to this feast of fellowship. The 
College was the theme. Great feeling was kindled. 
Their hearts flowed together and we read (Minutes 
1850, p. 62) "The Conference on Monday morning 
was distinguished by the warm flow of sympathy and 
affection, a high tone of spirituality, and the expression 
of the most earnest desire to do good. The wives 
also of the ministers, anxious to share in the enter- 
prise of founding the College, resolves to raise $100.00 
out of their own resources, and $70.00 were subscribed 
by fourteen who were present. ' ' It was at this meet- 
ing and in connection with her gift to the College that 
the wife of J. J. Hill, who died at the age of 28 uttered 
the words that have become somewhat celebrated and 
which are inscribed on her monument in the Hazel- 
wood Cemetery at Grinnell, ' ' Somebody must be built 
into these foundations. ' ' The great Kossuth apolo- 
gized for having hesitated in his address, "Pardon me, 
the shades of my fathers are passing before me. " It is 
not a bad vice to honor those who were generous, un- 
selfish, wise, and useful. Against Iowa was once 

[161] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

brought the reproach that she had no storied past. 
But we see in it now a Shechinah presence. In re- 
ferring to this incident at Dubuque, which occurred in 
his church, Dr. John C. Holbrook asserts (Recollec- 
tions of a Nonogenarian, p. 77) "that there was a 
pledge of $10.00 each," whereas we have found that 
"$70.00 were subscribed by fourteen who were 
present." But I am not seeking to reconcile matters 
of detail but to nail down the main fact of the two 
romantic occurrences. The College it will be seen grew 
out of the church as the waters in Ezekiel's vision 
flowed out of the sanctuary. We are not to think 
that the men, who shaped the beginnings and 
planted the small seed, made the history, marvelous 
as is the vitality of a seed. It is the history that has 
made the men. The first gift in point of size was al- 
most a negligible quantity. It was made important 
only by later bestowals. But the increase on that first 
dollar at compound interest, so we have been made 
to understand by a calculation, in less than 240 years 
would amount to more than two and one-half millions 
of dollars. But before the expiration of the time that 
amount will be required seeing that a blooded colt 
even now takes all the care and attention of a special 
trainer. 

When I have dreamed, by night or day, of some 
great good fortune, in the matter of money, of the 
arrival of the ship, or of " Money to burn, ' ' the vision 
has been beautiful and has not happened to be for 
myself, but for developing and perfecting the College, 
up to an equality with all modern requirements. And 

[162] 



THE GIFT OF THE BOTTOM DOLLAR 

if I could select for myself at this moment, and I say it 
reflectively, the result of the life, the rewards of which 
I would most desire, it would be to enable the College 
to rise nobly up to the exigent needs of the present 
century, with an educational work that the founders, 
in such a spirit of sacrifice, so heroically began, in a 
century that is gone. Not to take advanced ground 
is unworthy of our antecedents. As Dr. Judson used 
to insist, a bold aggressive spirit is demanded of the 
conductor of an institution like this and timeliness is 
essential in the question of success. This is the "Iowa 
Idea." My prayer is that the College may go on like 
Tennyson's brook. While romance and a little touch 
of pathos seem to have early entered into the so-called 
Grinnell Spirit, yet some go so far as to speak of the 
"New Grinnell/ ' but in all of her honorable history, 
there is one and only one Grinnell. Growing and in- 
creasing in strength with the support of the friends 
of education, there is a Grinnell idea, a composite 
sense, a geist, a sentiment, a genius, a movement cen- 
tered there, reinforcd continually, with new energy 
so excellent, now so obvious, as to incline us to acquaint 
ourselves with that aggregation of forces, that working 
together, have produced Grinnell. The College has a 
soul, an interior life, an esprit de corps, much as I 
dislike the use of the French phrase, although our 
English language has no equivalent for it, and this 
inherent noble quality is a distinct asset as it stirs 
enthusiasm and loyalty in the Alumni toward Alma 
Mater which is one of the purest and most chivalrous 
emotions. Her beginnings sprang from the passion 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

of eastern people, which is their best characteristic, 
that their children should be educated and should not 
grow up in ignorance and so enter upon life. And 
while the pioneer days are gone and all the rough 
conditions and hardships and their incredible toil and 
their primitive romance, yet their worthiest and 
most distinguishing purpose and their readiness of 
sacrifice, their determination to make a higher provi- 
sion than that reaped from their astonishingly pro- 
ductive fields, to subordinate materialism and the 
secular habit, to education and character were the 
birth and the re-birth of the Grinnell Spirit. Its 
atmosphere, its animation, its traditions, its ideals, its 
principle of evolution are the only things that have 
been continuous. No other College that has attained 
such size was ever subjected to such subversions. It 
was crowded off its campus by aggressive greed. ' * Get 
thee out into a land that I will show thee." It sub- 
mitted to removal and a second cradle place was pro- 
vided. It made adjustment to a new environment half 
way across a wide state which, however, proved very 
favorable to its growth. It is a mark of a healthy good 
thing that it tends to right itself. A fire took half of 
its visible wealth, a cyclone made a clean sweep of it. 
Eccentricity of opinion and doctrine, ultraism, idiosyn- 
crasy have appeared, but all soon merged again in the 
common purpose of Dr. Johnson's principle that the 
odd never lasts. Stones are set along the highway 
that mark the burial places of singularities and foibles 
while the continuity of work for seventy-five years has 
for its monument the beautiful College itself. The 

[164] 



THE GIFT OF THE BOTTOM DOLLAR 

institution at Grinnell today is enriched by a distinct 
contribution from each administration, diverse in 
touch and technique, as the several executives have 
been. Living or dead, their names are in our Hall of 
Fame. The only way to describe the present President 
is to think of the exact kind of a head that the College 
needs. All of its founders have passed up to the higher 
service and eternal rewards and are now looking down 
in benediction. And so it comes about that our beloved 
leader, a scholar among scholars, who knows how to 
turn, all the corners, who takes things by the smooth 
handle, is not only pushed by unseen hands but dis- 
cerns the beckoning of a future which has in it a strong 
survival of the Puritan spirit with that spirit 
modernized. The ideal of the College is to make a 
specialty of each student and give him at the critical 
period in his life an opportunity to do for himself, 
with the help of trainers, the best that he can do. 
With such a responsibility thrust upon her, as one of 
the elite institutions, she is constrained to reach out her 
hands to the Alumni and the friends of education for 
enlargement, educational expansion by endowment, 
that she may give all possible advantages to even her 
poorest student. For what does it avail a young per- 
son who lacks the wherewithal if we open a fountain of 
pure learning, if we do not by scholarships and prizes 
and rewards, make it possible for a youth to avail 
himself of it. This is vital in this institution justly 
held in such reverence for what she has actually 
shown of her wondrous transforming power. 

[165] 



XVIII 
THE GROWTH OP GOVERNMENT 

A Sermon Delivered Before the Executive and 
Legislative Departments of the Government of 
Massachusetts, at the Annual Election, Wed- 
nesday, January 2, 1878. 

COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS 



House of Representatives, Jan. 11, 1878. 
Ordered, That a committee of three be appointed to 
present the thanks of the House to the Rev. James L. Hill 
of Lynn, for his able and eloquent sermon preached before 
the executive and legislative branches of the government on 
the second instant, and to request a copy of the same for 
publication. 



House of Representatives, Jan. 11, 1878. 
Adopted, and Messrs. McGibbons of Lynn, Paige of Cam- 
bridge, and Sanford of Brockton, are appointed the com- 
mittee. 

Geo. A. Marden, Clerk. 

COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS 



House of Representatives, Boston, Jan. 16, 1878. 

Dear Sir, — By a vote of the House of Representatives, 

passed Jan. 11, the undersigned were appointed a committee 

to express the thanks of the House to you for the able and 

eloquent sermon preached before the executive and legisla- 

[166] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

tive branches of the government on the second instant, and 
to request a copy of the same for publication. 

It gives us great pleasure to communicate the above vote 
and request. 

Your obedient servants, 

SAM. S. McGIBBONS, 
BAALIS SANFORD, Jr., 
LUCIUS R. PAIGE, 

Committee. 
Rev. Jas. L. Hill. 



Lynn, Jan. 24, 1878. 

Gentlemen, — I have the honor to acknowledge the re- 
ceipt of your communication of the sixteenth instant, in be- 
half of the House of Representatives, requesting for the 
press a copy of the sermon preached before the executive 
and legislative departments of the State Government upon 
the first Wednesday of this month. In response to your re- 
quest so kindly expressed, I herewith place the sermon at 
your disposal. With sentiments of respect for the honorable 
body which you represent, and for yourselves personally, 
I am, gentlemen, 

Your obedient servant, 

JAMES L. HILL. 
To Hon. Sam. S. McGibbons, Baalis Sanford, Jr., 
Lucius R. Paige, 

Committee of House of Representatives. 

SERMON 

"Other men labored, and ye are entered into their labors." 

John iv. 38. 

With characteristic delicacy our Lord here 

alludes to the work which he himself has 

accomplished, by ascribing it simply to "others ;" 

[167] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

that is, to another agency than the disciples.* As 
they lift up their eyes to look upon a field white 
already to harvest, an incitement is given to men to 
enter into the labors of God. "He prepared and 
sowed the field/ ' says Meyer: "they were called 
upon to do what was still further necessary, and to 
reap." Men are encouraged to work because of 
what God hath wrought. The Lord has sown, the 
disciples shall reap, and all shall rejoice together. 
Whether made manifest by revelation or in nature, 
or in the mysterious guidance of individuals and 
nations, man's work is to accept, interpret, and voice 
the works of God. For the prophecy came not in old 
time by the will of man ; it was the gift of God. And 
as such, this revelation of Himself has made neither 
advancement nor development; but, receiving the 
divinely completed work, men, on their part, having 
learned the simple alphabet of the Old Testament, 
and the briefly comprehended lesson of the New 
Testament, have stimulated and aided one another, 
by what they have discovered and thought and felt, 
to "think after Him the great thoughts of God." 
Interpretation is begun. One doctor comments on 



*The word "men" does not occur in the literal text. "Who are 
the others? To regard Moses and the prophets as sowers, would 
derange and disjoint the whole saying. Christ is the sower." — Stier. 

"Jesus was the laborer. While self-evident from the connection, 
. . . with self-evident renunciation is half concealed under the 
plural others.' ' — Meyer. 

"Christ is led to reflect on the relation in which his labors stand 
to those of the apostles. ... It is best to understand the others 
as referring essentially to Christ alone, and to suppose that he adopts 
this form of expression merely in reference to the proverb, v. 37. — 
Tholuck. 

"By others here, he cannot mean the Old Testament prophets." 
— Alford. The plural is used to make the clauses of the text corre- 
spond with each other. 

[168] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

another doctor of the law. The law, being as it is 
the law of God, is fixed; but its exposition, being 
the work of the race universal, is enriched by the 
diversified and accumulated experiences and 
thoughts of the growing ages.* The best com- 
mentary is literally forever being written. 

Discoveries of truth never so rich have been 
made by our own generation; and "God hath more 
truth yet to break forth out of his holy word. ' ' The 
work of the Creator must in every realm, condition 
the work of the creature. Man is not an inventor, 
but a discoverer only. All the needs of commerce 
had been anticipated from the foundations of the 
world. That mysterious element which holds the 
quivering needle to the distant pole has waited for 
its application to the construction of the mariner's 
compass since the heavens and the earth were 
finished. When, as a blessing to the seafaring, the 
Eddystone Lighthouse — that triumph of mechanics 
which determines the subsequent character of 
similar structures — was to be rebuilt, "On this 
occasion/' writes John Smeaton in his famous Nar- 
rative, "the natural figure of a large spreading oak 
presented itself to my imagination as a figure not 
ungraceful, and, at the same time, carrying the idea 
of greatest firmness and solidity." 

In the improvements as well of all instruments 



* "Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to 
it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acqui- 
sitions, to future ages. In these pursuits, therefore, the first speculat- 
ors lie under great disadvantages, and, even when they fail, are 
entitled to praise." — Macaulay's Essavs (Student's Ed.), vol. i., 
p. 207. 

[I6 9 ] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

for the measurement of duration, man can aim only 
at an approximation to that accuracy in time which 
God has employed since the heavens were created, 
in the movements of the spheres. "I had noted/ ' 
said Sir Henry Wotton, "that all art was in the 
truest perfection when it might be reduced to some 
natural principle; for what are the most judicious 
artisans but the mimics of nature ?" 

Passing now from material objects and their 
qualities to the consideration of the benevolent con- 
duct of intelligent beings, still may we affirm, as we 
enter the political and moral realm, that ultimate 
principles, like the distinction between right and 
wrong, inhere in the nature of things. They are 
eternal, necessary truths. But how these principles 
may be applied to the practical relations of men, 
and become embodied in righteous government, is a 
matter of multifarious judgment, and must be 
learned through manifold ages by the experience of 
nations. We cannot at once incorporate divine 
principles into human laws. We perceive the 
principles, but cannot conceive the laws. The ben- 
evolent wisdom of God, men and generations of men 
must help one another to interpret and understand, 
and at length incorporate into the State. What God 
would contribute to splendid achievements in gov- 
ernment, is done. Man's work is by no means 
accomplished, but is advancing year by year, and 
from one generation to another ; and I have thought 
it not altogether inappropriate to adopt as my theme 
of discourse. 

[170] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

The Growth of Government 
The Infinite Mind, discerning all possible rela- 
tions, at once forms the divine government and laws 
in accordance with absolute right. Although we 
should not say that God creates it, yet He imper- 
sonates the right, and makes revelation of it. Our 
intuitions declare his character to be holy, because 
it is wholly conformed to the right. When man is 
created, he is brought into the conscious presence of 
a law whose mandate he must recognize. The law is 
uncreated; but man is created with reference to it, 
and to its claims his nature, by its very constitution, 
makes response. Thus, before all written statutes, 
men are a law unto themselves. The law may be dis- 
regarded; but still there exists a distinction between 
what is reasonable and what is unreasonable, — be- 
tween what is just and what is unjust. What a man 
wills to do is not ultimate, but rather what in 
recognition of this law he ought to do. The will is 
capricious. It inclines to become tyrannous. It 
must be conformed to a superior standard. The will 
of one, simply considered, has no right to insist upon 
the submission of the will of any other. 

There is a difference between yielding to an 
arbitrary will and consenting to a natural law. That 
it is possible to govern with the consent of the 
governed, implies the existence of a common prin- 
ciple to be observed by him who rules and by him 
who obeys. Tyrannies, whether they be of mon- 
archies or of democracies, — for there be despots 
many that are not crowned monarchs, — must stand 

[i7i] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

condemned at that bar where witnesses for the prose- 
cution are as many as there are true-hearted men. 
Arbitrary methods and enactments, in one form of 
governed, implies the existence of a common prin- 
ciples to be observed by him who rules and by 
protest of innate principle, shall feel the shock of an 
immortal energy.* The principle then to be rec- 
ognized in government is not in the exclusive 
possession of a favored class, but is as universal as 
humanity. The gradual recognition of the right of 
representation in government indicates that every 
man has a native sense of justice which another is 
only delegated, in the best manner, to express. The 
results of legislation, and in some measure through 
the publicity of debates the processes of legislation, 
must commend themselves to every man's con- 
science. Men, if enlightened and honest, not because 
they are rulers, but because they are men, may aid 
in the discovery and appliance of truth and justice. 
Their researches must be encouraged. All the ele- 
ments of good that any time exist disseminated 
throughout society must be extracted, unified, and 
constantly organized into the structure of the gov- 



*"Such is the force of liberal opinions when they have once 
taken root in the popular mind that notwithstanding- the ordeal to 
which they are exposed, and notwithstanding the punishments in- 
flicted on the advocates, it is found impossible to stifle them, and 
it is found impossible even to prevent their increase. . . . Every 
system must fall if it opposes the march of opinions, and gives shel- 
ter to maxims and institutions repugnant to the spirit of the age. In 
this sort of contest the ultimate result is never doubtful. The vigor 
of public opinion is unaffected by the laws of mortality. ... It 
does not flourish to-day and decline to-morrow. This has always 
seemed to me a decisive proof of the natural and healthy march of 
English civilization." — Buckle's History of Civilization in England, 
vol. i., pp. 357-8. 



[172] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

ernment.* Only when concentrated, embodied, and 
clothed with power, do these scattered and frag- 
mentary forces yield their full strength to the pro- 
motion of the progress and welfare of the State.* 
The discoveries of truth at best will be gradual. The 
satellites of Mars patiently waited to be found. The 
planet Neptune was seen fifty years before it was 
discovered. It is the perturbation in the motion of 
Uranus that discloses another superior planet, and 
only more remote. 

There are superior political principles yet to be 
found, to give completeness to our system, and to 
account for departures that are constantly being 
made from the prescribed path of our preconceived 
theories; and within the orbit of a lesser truth the 
attractive influence of a greater shall lead to its 
discovery. Neptune had been seen, and its position 
in the heavens marked down; but the astronomer 
had made up his mind that it was a fixed star, all 
unconscious that a world was to be added to the 
solar system. And, in the firmament of truth, the 
heavens are studded with gems, whose significance 
is still unappreciated, but whose real character shall 



*"It was a remark of Burke, made in the British Parliament, in 
his celebrated reply to Fox on the subject of the French Revolution, 
'that he who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his 
own.' Men cannot act alone: every faculty of the mind is adapted to 
exert its peculiar power in society. All have something to ask, some- 
thing to give, something to do." — History of Democracy: Capen. 
Vol. i., p. 3. 

*"What the science of mechanics is to matter, party is to knowl- 
edge. The one leads to the improvement of material things, the 
other to the advancement of society. Party may be denominated the 
manifold form of moral power in action. Its elements are to be 
found in the principles of human nature. ... It permanently 
aids in opening paths of truth. It has an onward and conservative 
power. — Hist, of Democ, vol. i., p. 1. 



[173] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

yet be known ; and not only shall the comprehension 
of one truth lead to the apprehension of another, but, 
also many incidental truths shall still attend upon 
what shall yet be disclosed, like the attendance of 
Neptune's satellite upon the planet. There is a 
difference between seeing a thing and knowing it, 
and a truth cannot be fully known until its force is 
experienced, and that widely and by successive gen- 
erations. Our sense of justice is one thing; our 
judgment is quite another. With reference to the 
Infinite Ruler, these terms may be used interchange- 
ably. Not so with us. Between them occurs, some- 
times, a fearful hiatus. Our intuitions are good, and 
our motives in government are good, but our judg- 
ment may be poor. To make judgment the trans- 
cription of justice is the progressive work of the 
ages. Judgment necessitates the data of experience. 
This is a growth. It involves an interminable series 
of well-considered efforts to adjust the parts of a 
community to the whole and the whole to the parts.* 
Society has some common interests in opposition to 
the individuals composing it. The individual must 
yield something to the State; and yet it exists for 
the man, and not the man to aggrandize the State. 
In Plato 's conception, a citizen differed from a slave 
only in this, that he had the State for his master. 



*As stated in its preamble, the Constitution of Massachusetts 
"is a Social Compact by which the whole people covenants with 
each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall 
be governed by certain laws for the common good." — Manual of 
General Court, p. 39. 

"All the constitutional authority ever posssessed by the kings of 
Great Britain over their dominions was by compact derived from the 
people, and held of them for the common interest of the whole 
society." — Constitution of New Jersey. 

[174] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

This is a Pagan idea, and not a Christian. In the 
Christian view, men are created alike, in the image 
of God; they have an independent value, and are 
equal. Nothing seems more elementary and evident. 
But in all rudimentary government the family was 
the unit. The patriarchy tended to become mon- 
archy. 

The subject was taught to recognize authority, 
a thing so desirable in itself, but suppressive in its 
influence and tendency. The irresponsible use of 
power ends in its abuse. This abuse rouses men 
from that inertia which must be recognized as a law 
in the movements in human history, as well as a 
law in the motion of bodies, and which induces a 
peculiar tendency to rest or to depart from the exist- 
ing order of things only so far as exigencies may 
require. Extreme despotism gives rise to extreme 
views of personal liberty. It can almost be said 
that the first step toward freedom is a misstep or 
overstep on the part of its assailant. That a people 
becomes disinthralled by being inthralled. But 
liberty does not begin with a people's enjoyment 
of it. It antedates all the forms of its expression. 

The spirit is given : a body is grown. The re- 
cognition has been gradual ; the principle is eternal. 

" Since neither now nor yesterday began 
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can 
A man be found who their first entrance knew." 

The struggle of six centuries abroad, and our 
own conflict and progress for a century and a half, 

[175] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

brought us to the declaration that men were free 
and equal. Now, it is very significant that, for the 
perfected expression of this doctrine, we must come 
forward with the march of the centuries ; but to find 
the principles which men and generations of men 
have labored to embody, we must go backward to 
the very beginnings of constitutional government, 
only to find them assumed in the code of nature. 
"Whenever Roman jurisprudence, which has the 
longest known history of any set of human institu- 
tions, attempts to conform itself to the code of na- 
ture/ ' all men are considered equal. This, as shown 
by Maine in his Ancient Law, is with the Romans 
a strictly legal rule. With the French it becomes a 
political proposition. All men are equal in the sense 
of ought to be equal. And the maxim begins to ex- 
press the sense of a great standing wrong suffered 
by mankind. A century ago the doctrine passed 
over to America. Says Maine, "The American 
lawyers of the time, and particularly those of Vir- 
ginia, appear to have possessed a stock of knowledge, 
including much that could have been derived only 
from the legal literature of Continental Europe. A 
very few glances at the writings of Jefferson will 
show how strongly his mind was affected by the 
semi-judicial, semi-popular opinions which were 
fashionable in France ; and we cannot doubt that it 
was sympathy with the peculiar ideas of the French 
jurists which led him, and the other Colonial lawyers 
who guided the course of events in America, to join 
the especially French assumption that all men are 

[176] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

born equal, with the assumption more familiar to 
Englishmen that all men are born free, in the very- 
first lines of the Declaration of Independence. " 
These self-evident truths, gathered from Roman, 
French and English sources, but organized upon our 
shores, "gave an impulse to political movements in 
this country, were returned to their home in Great 
Britain and France endowed with vastly greater 
energy and enjoying much greater claims on general 
reception and respect : they have thoroughly leav- 
ened modern opinions, and promise to modify most 
deeply the constitution of societies and the politics 
of States." The principle expressed is a germ un- 
created, eternal. It has steadily grown. Its roots, 
beginning early to spread, are firmly grounded in 
the past. Its development is historic. Therein is 
its value. Nothing has been improvised. Every part 
of our political inheritance has its own bitter price 
of conflict and sacrifice, and is hoary with history. 
Our fathers organized what no single nation nor any 
generation was sufficient to produce. Our Federal 
institutions have peculiar claims to our veneration 
for having been thus wrought out in the direct line 
of historic succession and experience.* "The prin- 
ciples and feelings,' ' said John Adams, "which pro- 
duced the Revolution, ought to be traced back for 
two hundred years, and sought in the history of the 



* "Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to re- 
spect yourselves. . . . You began ill, because you began by despising 
every thing that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a 
capital. If the last generation of your country appeared without much 
lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your 
claims from a more early race of ancestors." — Reflections on Revolu- 
tion in France: Burke. Vol. iii., p. 278. 



[177] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

country from the first plantations in America." "I 
have always laughed," said he again, "at the affec- 
tation of representing American Independence as a 
novel idea, as a modern discovery, as a late inven- 
tion. The idea of it, as a possible thing, has been 
familiar to Americans from the first settlement of 
the country, and was as well understood by Gov- 
ernor Winthrop in 1675, as by Governor Samuel 
Adams when he told you that Independence had 
been the first wish of his heart for seven years.' ,# 
Independence Hall, Faneuil Hall, this old South 
Church, with its sacred associations, is not the 
cradle of liberty. The Declaration of Independence, 
as its name implies, is but the declaration of some- 
thing that had already come to exist.! Liberty is 
fraught with a significance it could not claim had it 
sprung up suddenly, one summer 's day, like Jonah 's 
gourd, as a matter of temporary protection. For its 
enjoyment men have labored. They have not made 
it, but they have made it to grow. 

Transplanted shrubs and trees flourish best. 
The nursery is too strait for them. So liberty needed 
other soil and freer air. This continent, providen- 



*Works of John Adams, vol. ix., p. 596. ''All great effects have 
remote and slowly-operating causes. To my view the New-England 
of 1775-76, — the movement of John Adams and his compeers for In- 
dependence, are to Winthrop's administration something like what the 
fruit is to the blossom." — Palfrey" s History of New England, vol. 
ii., p. 266. 

t" There is not an idea in it but has hackneyed in Congress for 
two years." — Adam's Works, vol. ii., p. 514. "The truth is, the sub- 
ject had long been familiar to the contemplation of all members of 
Congress." — John Adams to Mercy Warren. "Otis was a flame of 
fire. . . . Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposi- 
tion to the arbitrary claim of Great Britain: then and there the child 
Independence was born. In fifteen years, namely in 1776. he grew up 
to Manhood and declared himself free." — Adam's Works, vol. x., 
pp. 247-8. 



[178] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

tially unknown and unoccupied by settled inhabi- 
tants, was reserved, until, with, the history of the 
world to guide them, and having learned the value 
of freedom by its loss, a disciplined people had been 
gradually prepared to institute here what the ground 
was pre-occupied against establishing there. "In 
view of the thick clouds that were gathering over 
their homes, Vv T inthrop and his associates/' says 
Palfrey, "conceived a project no less important 
than of laying on this side of the Atlantic a nation's 
foundations, which could be built upon as future 
circumstances would allow. They contemplated the 
possibility that the time was near at hand when all 
that was best of what they had left behind would 
follow them to these shores." 

The pilgrims to this continent were ideas as 
well as men. We are taught to make grateful recog- 
nition of what England conferred in the gift of her 
sons, but we are not so often reminded of our special 
indebtedness for the valuable home instruction 
which those sons received from "the mother of us 
all." The principles which produced revolution here 
would have resulted in revolution in Old England, 
had they not found expression in New England.* 



*Since this sermon was delivered, the writer, on reading Dr. J. 
P. Thompson's "The United States as a Nation" is glad to find 
himself re-enforced by such excellent authority. The Revolution was 
to preserve freedom, and not primarily to acquire it. "The Colo- 
nists renounced their allegiance to George III., not because he was 
a king, but because they had come to look upon him as a prince 
whose character was marked by every act that may define a tyrant, 
and therefore unfit to be the ruler of a free people. As Englishmen, 
and the sons of Englishmen, they were freeborn. To such a people 
national independence was a foregone conclusion, not indeed in their 
own original purpose, but in the logic of events." pp. 2, 3. "The 
English people owe to the American Revolution no small share in the 
conservation of their own local and popular freedom against the 



[!79] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

For against their progress nothing shall be able to 
stand. We trace their stages of growth through 
Magna Charta, Petition of Right, Bill of Rights, the 
Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Con- 
federation and Perpetual Union, and the Federal 
Constitution. The present has never been dissevered 
from the past. Every step of progress is conditioned 
upon some earlier step.* The exact form which the 
political development should assume has been un- 
forseen, for it has not been the result of speculation, 
but the consequent of experience. All those ideal 
constitutions which have been formed by phil- 
osophers in accordance with their theories, and with- 
out reference to history or experience, have ever 
been, as they ever must be, egregious failures. t 
Men cannot be makers of a constitution, but only 
framers of it. Our Federal constitution was not 
adopted until it was found, by the convention that 
assembled for the revision of the articles of Con- 
federation, that a new instrument was necessary to 
embody the new growth. The idea of abolishing 
the Confederation, and adopting in its place the 



encroachments of the crown, and also in that wise and liberal policy 
that now retains English Colonies within the British Empire." — p. 49. 

* "These humble but fearless adventurers . . . adopted the com- 
mon law of England as the general basis of their jurisprudence, vary- 
ing it, however, from time to time by municipal regulations better 
adapted to their situation, or conforming more exactly to their stern 
notions of the absolute authority and universality of the Mosaic in- 
stitutions." — Story on the Constitution, vol. i., p. 30. 

f'For government, let it be in the hands of one, assisted with 
some counsel, and let them have commission to exercise martial laws 
with some limitation. When the plantation grows to strength, then 
it is time to plant with women as with men." — Bacon: Of Planta- 
tions. Essays. (Boston, Ed.) pp. 335-6. 

Locke's constitution for South Carolina is another illustration. 
"In framing constitutions for Carolina, Locke forgot that there can 
be no such thing as a creation of laws." — Bancroft's History of 
the United States. (Cent. Ed.) Vol. i., p. 494. 



[180] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

Constitution was not at first the end contemplated 
by the States. Healthful life never comes forth 
from the old forms until enforced to do so for the 
sake of enlarged and continued growth.* 

Under the Constitution we have been testing 
its excellence and its strength. For scores of years, 
recurring in different forms, the question has been 
constantly arising, what is the true meaning of its 
very first line. Ought it to read, "We the people," 
or would it better read, "We the States ?"t "When 
the two sections of the country were no longer ar- 
rayed in arms against each other," still, in the words 
of the peace-loving and sagacious Chief Magistrate 
of the nation in his recent message to Congress, 
"there was a wide-spread apprehension that the 
momentous results of our progress as a nation, 
marked by the recent amendments to the constitu- 
tion, were in imminent jeopardy. But now the 
earnest purpose of good citizens generally to sup- 
plant the destructive force of the mutual animosities 
of races and of sectional hostility, and to unite their 
efforts to make permanent the pacification of the 
country is evident." What is called, at the Capitol 
in Washington, "the most important of all our na- 
tional interests," is but the re-echo of that prophetic 



*"Pacavius sometimes advised his neighbors of Capua not to 
cashier their old magistrates till they could agree upon a better to 
place in their room; so did these choose to abide by the laws of 
England till they could be provided of better." — Hubbard's History, 
chap. 10, p. 62. 

fWhile the people choose to maintain it as it is, while they are 
satisfied with it and refuse to change it. who has given, or who can 
give, to the State Legislatures a right to alter it, either by interfer- 
ence, construction, or otherwise? — Webster's Reply to Havne. Jan. 
26, 1830. Works, vol. iii., p. 340. 



[181] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

voice, uttered in the Capitol of Massachusetts and 
before your honorable body, the two branches of 
the Legislature, twelve years ago tomorrow, by His 
Excellency John A. Andrew, of proudly-cherished 
memory, who, with all the emphasis that came from 
five years of executive administration at the helm 
of this Ship of State in stormy and perilous times, 
declared, " There ought now to be a vigorous prose- 
cution of the peace, just as vigorous as our recent 
prosecution of the war."* Those who, like our 
great War-Governor, were first in war, were first 
as well also in peace ; for they went into the war — ■ 
aye, and what is more, they came out of the war — on 
principle. Such men are above party hostility and 
personal recrimination. Right, justice, reason, love, 
peace, are above party consideration; and while 
there is a God of peace, they shall not lack for a 
party, and that one an invincible. After what a 
strife, in what a union, and with what patient, 
anxious waiting, is it now being settled that it is not 
"We the States," but with its full and blessed mean- 
ing it is truly "We the people of the United States, 
in order to insure domestic tranquility and secure 
the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our pos- 
terity, do ordain and establish this constitution for 
the United States of America." 



*The words of Governor Andrew are as appropriate to-day as 
when they were spoken : ' 'I am satisfied that with the support of a 
firm policy from the President, and with the help of conciliatory and 
generous disposition on the part of the North, the measures needed 
for permanent and universal welfare can surely be obtained. We 
ought to extend our hands with cordial good-will, demanding no atti- 
tude of humiliation from any, inflicting no acts of humiliation upon 
any. The offence of war has met its appropriate punishment at the 
hands of war." Valedictory Address, pp. 38 and 39: Senate Doc. 
No. 2, 1866. 

[182] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

I. In the light of what now has been suggested 
we may have disclosed to our view the substantial 
basis of Christian patriotism. If it were possible for 
a government to be at once made by a certain num- 
ber of individuals, the object of our veneration 
would be, not the State, so much as the men who 
gave us the State. Patriotism would be perverted 
into love for the patriot, instead of being a patriot's 
love for his country. But if government is grown, 
we are brought first to the acknowledgment of the 
divine superintendence of that Providence who has 
supplied the conditions of growth; under whose 
laws and under whose care from age to age the 
growth proceeds so quietly, that the succession of 
generations is less marked than the annual growth 
of the forest trees. And then we are taught to 
recognize the principle of growth, within the State 
itself, divinely implanted. As possessed with life we 
ought to foster the State, and think of it, and love it. 
It is not a thing. It is being* 

It was not born at its full. Its growth is the 
substance of history. The incidents of that history 
which mark the stages of its growth are the order- 
ings of God. In many of them the end proposed by 
man differed from the end contemplated by the 
Ruler of nations. The union that withstood the 
British was enforced by the encroachments of the 
French. The very union that was to throw off an 



*' "There is a mystery ... in the soul of state 
Which hath an operation more divine 
Than breath or pen can give expression to." 

Troilus and Cressida, Act III., sc. 3. 



[183] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

oppressive yoke was effected in part by the instru- 
ments of oppression themselves, who sought to cen- 
tralize all authority that it might become more 
directly subject to the absolute will of the king. 
While the principles incorporated into the Declara- 
tion of Independence were so largely drawn from 
the political and popular sentiments of the French 
people, it was the Divine guardianship that kept our 
institutions from the taint of the infidel notions at 
that time prevailing in France, and with which the 
mind of Jefferson was in notorious sympathy.* He 
who is Governor among the nations used Jefferson in 
effecting one revolution, but keeps us graciously 
from the pernicious effects of Jefferson's theory of 
the desirability of a rebellion every twenty years, 
with the idea that a rebellion now and then is a good 
thing, and as necessary in the political world as 
storms in the physical. t The aristocratic tendencies 
of the first two Presidents! are divinely utilized in 



*The residence of Jefferson in Europe is one of the most curious 
portions of his life, less on account of what he did than of what he 
saw and thought, and deserves to be studied if we desire thoroughly 
to appreciate the part which Jefferson afterward played in his country 
at the head of the democratic party. It was in Paris that he learned 
to abhor the whole social organization of Europe ; it was in Paris that 
he learned to hate the power both of the aristocracy and clergy." — 
Jefferson and the American Democracy, pp. 123-4. The men who 
effected the revolution were not all believers. . . . Prayers and public 
fasts continued to be resorted to whenever it was found desirable, 
by agitators or the state, to act powerfully on the minds of the people. 
— Ibid. p. 17. 

fWorks of Jefferson, vol. ii., p. 318. Honest republican gover- 
nors should become so ' 'mild in their punishment of rebellions as not 
to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the 
sound health of government." — Ibid, p. 105. "No country should 
be so long without a rebellion." — Ibid, p. 331. 

$Such, for instance, as the Vice-President, John Adams, pom- 
pously going about, like a prince, in his carriage with six horses; 
Mrs. Washington, on her entrance into New York, receiving a salute 
of thirteen guns; the presidential palace, and the luxury and etiquette 
which gave it a resemblance to Versailles; the servants in livery, the 
guests in full dress, every body standing before the head of the 



[i8 4 ] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

founding the Federal Government; but that One 
who is our Master, and by whose doctrine we all are 
brethren, could still reserve Jefferson "to root out 
every germ of centralization and monarchy, and to 
introduce into the working of the government the 
preponderating influence of democratic ideas."* The 
acquisition of good is not accidental. It is not the 
caprice of war or fortune. It points us to the Being 
under whose benevolent auspices this principle of 
selection graciously works. 



state; and, to sum up all, the ball at which Washington had sat upon 
a sofa resembling a throne, and that committee of senate which had 
gone so far as to wish to give the President the title of Highness and 
Protector. — Jefferson and the American Democracy, p. 179. 
Washington was himself, says Higginson, in favor of the words 
"High Mightiness," the words used to describe the Stadholder of 
Holland; that state being then a republic. "Jefferson's administra- 
tion was conducted on a system very different, in some respects, from 
those of Washington and Adams. His personal habits were very 
simple, and so were his views of government. Instead of going in a 
coach and six to the Capitol, as Washington had done, Jefferson 
rode thither on horseback on the day of his inauguration, dis- 
mounted, tied his horse to a post, and read his address. Afterwards 
he did not do even this, but sent a "message" to Congress by a 
secretary, as has been the practice ever since. He abolished the 
weekly levees, but on New Year's Day and the Fourth of July threw 
open his doors to the whole people. He would not have his birthday 
celebrated, as had been the previous custom; but concealed the day in 
order to prevent this." Washington wrote to John Jay ( Sparks' s 
Life of Washington, vol. ix., p. 187): "We have probably had too 
good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation. Ex- 
perience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execu- 
tion measures best calculated for their own good without the inter- 
vention of a coercive power." "The glare of royalty and nobility 
during (Adam's) mission to England had made him believe their 
fascination a necessary ingredient in government." — Works of 
Jefferson, vol. ix., pp. 97 and 507. 

* "Jefferson's accession to the Presidency in 1801 was repre- 
sented by himself as a pacific revolution, as real as that of 1776 ; a 
revolution, not of form but of principle, which rescued the vessel of 
the state from the monarchical current into which it had been steered 
while the people slept, and brought it back to its natural current, — 
the republican and democratic current." — Jefferson's Works, vol. 
ii., pp. 133, 135. "The contests of that day were contests of prin- 
ciple between the advocates of republican and those of kingly gov- 
ernment." — Ibid, vol. ix., p. 88. "It was my lot," wrote Jefferson 
in 1820, to the grandfather of the writer. — Hon. Mark Langdon Hill 
of Maine, — "to be charged with the duty of changing the course of 
the government from what we deemed a monarchical to its republican 
tack."— Ibid. p. 154. 

[185] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

Not a great political idea has existed, no policy 
or philosophy of government has prevailed as a 
power in the earth, but some vestige of it is now 
inwrought into the political fabric. So the historian 
Hume represents the national character of the Eng- 
lish people to be "a union of all the excellent 
qualities possessed separately by different portions 
of the great human family." So the nature of 
Milton,* as pictured by Macaulay, "selected and 
drew to itself," and "combined in harmonious 
union, whatever was great and good, while it re- 
jected all the base and pernicious ingredients by 
which those finer elements were defiled." As the 
idea of beauty expressed in the Apollo Belvedere, or 
in the Venus de Medici, is not taken from an indi- 
vidual, but the excellences and perfections found 
only in parts scattered here and there among the 
members of the human family, are rather, with a 
happy and congenial grouping, blended into one 
standard form, which is not ideal but a real trans- 
cription of the symmetry of man as he came from 
the hand of his Maker; thus appropriating all that 
deserves perpetuation, the State gathers from every 
source, and combines whatever exists dispersed in 
the world of reason, justice, truth; organizes them 
into unity,* calls them to the occupation of power, 



* "Milton did not strictly belong to any of the classes we have 
described. He was not a Puritan. He was not a Free-thinker. He 
was not a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of every 
party were combined in harmonious union. — Macauley's Essay on 
Milton. (Student's Ed. Essays.) Vol. i., p. 259. 

*"Our fabric is so constituted, one part bears so much on the 
other, the parts are so made for one another and for nothing 
else, that to introduce any foreign matter into it is to destroy it. 
This British Constitution has not been struck out at a heat 



[186] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

and becomes a government, not ideal only, but a real 
incarnation in political and human relations of 
primitive divine principles, whose effect is to enable 
men to enter into sympathy with the thoughts and 
labors of God. 

II. A practical inference, moreover, of consid- 
erable importance, derived from the truth that a 
State is grown and not made, may be found in the 
fact that growth proceeds quietly in times of peace. 
In its nature, growth is neither turbulent nor dem- 
onstrative. Indeed, so unostentatiously are its 
processes carried on as to escape the detection of all, 
except the most careful observer. The pages of his- 
tory contain chiefly the annals of revolutions, but 
such principles are only contended for in war as 
have been grown in peace. * It is a rude and spirit 1 
less controversy when the parties to it do not know 
what it is about. The diary of a collegian may con- 
tain the date of his matriculation and of his gradua- 
tion ; but the significance of these is only relative to 
that process of discipline and that informing of 
the mind, over against the acquisition of which no 
date can be affixed, for what is valuable is slowly 
acquired and gradually manifested. So with the 



by a set of presumptuous men like the assembly of pettifoggers run 
mad in Paris. 

1 'Tis not the hasty product of a day, 
But the well-ripened fruit of wise delay.' 
It is the result of the thoughts of many minds in many ages." — 
The Works of Edmund Burke. Vol. iii., p. 209. 

*"The period [before the revolution] abounded in new forms of 
virtue and greatness. Fidelity to principle pervaded the masses. In 
every hand was the Bible ; every home was a house of prayer. Child 
of the Reformation, closely connected with the past centuries and with 
the greatest struggles of mankind, New England has been planted 
by enthusiasts who feared no sovereign but God." — Bancroft's His- 
tory of the United States. (Centenary Ed.) Vol. iii., pp. 11, 98. 



[i87] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

annals of a nation. Public sentiment determines the 
character of future events during those periods of 
unobtrusive growth which furnish fewest materials 
for the historian. The annalist takes knowledge of 
popular opinion in the light of its event. The states- 
man has the more difficult task of dealing with a prev- 
alent feeling with reference to its event. ' ' But what 
do we mean by the American Revolution? " said 
John Adams. "Do we mean the American war? 
The revolution was effected before the war com- 
menced. The revolution was in the minds and 
hearts of the people, — a change in their religious 
sentiments, of their duties and obligations. This 
radical change in the principles, opinions, senti- 
ments, and affections of the people was the real 
American Revolution."* There is, then, the neces- 
sity of adopting a policy in times of peace as well as 
in times of war. It will not aim immediately at 
expression, but will first foster and develop those 
sentiments which determine all subsequent events. 
When a law is to be given, and the people are 
nervously awaiting the appearance of the giver, it 
is something to be able to say, "I am not he, but 
there cometh another." When a measure on our 
part is prepared for adoption, it requires a share of 
heavenly wisdom to wait for the fullness of the time 
to come. To the mind of the Eternal Law-giver 
there has been no new feature introduced into the 
plan of salvation since time began. But the scheme 
is not at once disclosed. It is a sign of weakness 



*Works of John Adams. Vol. x., pp. 282-4. 

[188] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

when thoughts are expressed so soon as conceived. 
On the heavenly side everything is prepared, but 
man's mind is an unwritten tablet. He is inexpe- 
rienced, untaught, untried. He does not know in 
its measure what his need is, and what holiness is, 
as distinguished from untried innocency. Trans- 
gression must become heinous by the character of 
the penalties attached. Dependence on God must 
be learned by wanderings in the wilderness. Re- 
ligious sentiments and methods of expression must 
be learned by a minute divine ceremonial. Men 
must come to worship God in the beauty of holiness 
by the attractive observances of the ancient temple 
service. When the consummate terminal flower is 
produced, we must not ignore that stem along 
which the sap and beauty were carried up for its 
adornment ; for we only know how much that flower 
expresses by the knowledge of the grounds whence 
it sprung, and the blessing of the fragrance it sheds 
abroad in all the earth. 

The legislator of the Christian era may learn a 
lesson from the divine Law-giver, who produces first 
a sentiment, and awakes a sense of need. He 
quickens desire before supplying its object. "Wilt 
thou be made whole?" is the first step in the divine 
process. So in seeking to heal the impotence of 
society, following in the steps of Omniscience, gov- 
ernment will effect first a wholesome sentiment on 
the part of the people. The first work must be 
wrought in them. They cannot be healed in spite of 
themselves. Until they feel the need of purification 

[189] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

they cannot be cleansed. There can be no reform 
before they demand reform. Good government is 
not practicable until, on all sides, it is desirable. It 
represents not the ideal, but the actual sentiments of 
the people. While the government is for the people, 
it is still by the people. Like a Greek palimpsest, 
every law is underwritten with "we the people." 
King Saul, taking the best of everything to himself, 
his officers and servants, and Barabbas the robber, 
were once the multitude's choice. Now and then a 
righteous law has been repealed or modified because 
the people were not ready for its enforcement. The 
masses are slowly affected. The inertia of the body- 
politic is like the inertia of matter; before a body can 
be brought to a given velocity, this velocity must 
be impressed upon every particle of matter it con- 
tains. 

There are agitators in every community who 
cannot bide the time of ripened fruit, but by violent 
and irregular action would prematurely strip the 
laden boughs of a coming harvest, to cover only 
with windfalls the lap of expectant earth. The 
fruits of righteousness are not procured by accident, 
nor manufactured to order in a trice. Nature's law 
is first the blade, then the ear, after that the full 
corn in the ear. Comprehensive statesmanship 
observes this law of growth. It sows the seed, and 
then patiently works and waits for the harvest. It 
seeks to inform the public mind. It brings the means 
of general intelligence within the reach of the 
lowest classes. It addresses itself, not to the enmity 

[190] ; 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

of an opposing faction, but to the understanding 
which it seeks withal to enlighten. It spares no 
pains to secure the observance of our public anni- 
versaries, and to keep alive the patriotic sentiments 
of our fathers. It makes men so thoroughly believe 
in the nation that they will die for its preservation. 
It trains the youth to an intense love of country, 
recognizing the nation as greater even than the State. 
It detects in these times of financial distress and of 
mutual distrust, a tendency to forego considera- 
tions of sentiment for those of necessity. It is 
ingenious in devices to attract attention to our noble 
institutions, which have grown so quietly and so 
beautifully great that we pass under their grateful 
shade, unmindful of their fair and time-honored pro- 
portions. It puts a patriotic and elevated literature 
into the hands of all its wards. It jealously guards 
the sabbath and recognizes the helpfulness of the 
church. It seeks to engage in a preventive ministry, 
to anticipate and avert possible disasters. It loves 
to preserve and strengthen virtue as well as to 
reform vice. It will supplant institutions that are 
reformatory by those that are conservatory. Our 
Saviour had compassion on the multitude, and inter- 
posed a miracle, not to restore the already famished, 
but with tender thoughtfulness of the people He 
asserted His divine power lest they faint in the way. 
The love for the people which is Christ-like is of 
ready expedients for the work of prevention, as well 
as the work of redemption. The popular cry for 
retrenchment may induce a false economy. One 

[191] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

may be too poor to be economical. Doors of industry 
will be closed only to make enlarged accommoda- 
tions for vagrancy. It is not popular legislation 
which makes appropriations for what does not 
already exist, — only to forestall what may come to 
exist, — but it is wise legislation. The people must 
be brought to see that of which the statesman al- 
ready has views. Aiming at what is to be ultimately 
accomplished, he works first w T ith secondary causes. 
He produces that which, in turn, will produce the 
result. He is a superintendent of growth. An 
election indicates only its stages of progress. A vote 
measures the man who casts it, as well as the man 
whose name it bears. One can be above bidding for 
votes, when, if he has a righteous cause, he can 
gr.ow them; and nothing is more worthy of a citizen. 
"Voting," it is well said, "changes no opinions. It 
only records them." The election day might become, 
even politically considered, the least important day 
of the year, as the evening hour in which a dealer 
counts his gains is of less significance than the busy 
hours in which he earned them. "Republics abound 
in young civilians," says one of our own philoso- 
phers, "who believe that the laws make the city; 
that commerce, education, and religion may be 
voted in or out; but the wise know that the State 
must follow and not lead the character and progress 
of the citizen, and that the form of government 
which prevails is the expression of what cultivation 
exists in the population which permits it. The law 
is only a memorandum. The history of the State 

[192] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, 
and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture 
and of aspiration."* 

III. Furthermore, we may reach the conclusion 
that every generation may obtain substantial claim 
upon the respect and veneration of its descendants. 
In the animal kingdom man alone is characterized by 
a continuous collective growth from one generation 
to another.! He alone cherishes veneration for 
antiquity. He alone can effect permanently by his 
thought and action all the individuals which com- 
pose the race which he represents. "Not only each 
man advances daily in the sciences," says Pascal, 
"but all men unitedly make a never-ceasing progress 
in them; so that the whole succession of human 
beings during the course of so many ages ought to 
be considered as one identical man, who subsists 
always and learns without end." In transmitting 
an inheritance enriched and defended by so many 
generations, in becoming the connecting link be- 
tween such a history and such a manifest destiny, 
the guardians of our Commonwealth require alike 
the spirit of the true conservative and the spirit of 
the true reformer. 

The conservative renders secure all the things so 
dearly acquired. As a superintendent of growth, he 
possesses the requisite spirit of patience. He finds 
no other such instructive lesson in history as is 



*Essay on Politics: Emerson's Prose Works, vol. i., p. 521-2. 

f'Man reflects upon his reflection; thinks on his thoughts; 
makes the mind itself the subject of its inquiry." — Lieber's Polit. 
Eth., vol. i., p. 11. 



[!93] 



THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

learned from the abortive attempts which have 
always been making to anticipate growth. He knows 
the futility of immature procedure. To adopt a 
measure before its time is to kill the project, and to 
bring it into universal disfavor. With what em- 
phasis do our annals speak of the folly of trying to 
incorporate a thing that does not exist, and support- 
ing it with an influence which had not been acquired. 

But, as well as the conservative, the age de- 
mands the work of the true reformer. Legislation, 
in an important sense, is a process of elimination. 
It grows by discontinuance. 

The development of grander principles relieves 
the necessity of inferior laws, as emancipation abro- 
gates all statutes pertaining to the relation of slaves. 
By comparing the early enactments of the colonies 
with the present statutes, we see how many laws are 
dispensed with, and petty requirements outgrown. 
Advancing civilization increases the number of per- 
sons in every community who have ceased to feel 
the restraints of government. They need no longer 
to be bound by the ancient tether. Old forms are 
now outgrown; but that is a matter of the body, 
and not of the spirit. The body is constantly chang- 
ing its expression, and this mortal shall put on 
immortality ; but whatever the changes, still it is the 
old spirit. We cannot give up the old. We welcome 
with delight the new. Preserving in its purity the 
spirit, we will improve and beautify with every 
excellent adornment a temple for its indwelling. 

When a temple was to be reared at Jerusalem, 

094] 



THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 

King David, a man of war, collected the materials 
out of which. King Solomon, a man of peace, built 
the house. 

The granite slabs from Sinai, inscribed with the 
ten commandments, lay within the Ark of the Cov- 
enant in the Holy of Holies. ' ' There was nothing in 
the ark save these." While the sceptre of Aaron's 
priesthood is lost, God's law remains, and the house 
is filled with a cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled 
it. So, in rearing a political structure, the sons of 
royal fathers take up an unfinished task. The great 
buildings of God are not completed in one genera- 
tion. Like magnificent cathedrals, they are eloquent 
with the story of toils and sacrifices in other ages 
than our own. Who shall tell whence all the mate- 
rials have been gathered ! Who shall name the mul- 
titude of the builders who, with differences of ad- 
ministrations and diversities of gifts, have been 
actuated by the Self-same Spirit, the God of our 
fathers — who endureth forever! Who shall con- 
ceive the glory of the structure if the Holy One 
accepts and establishes the work of our hands be- 
cause it has been but the intrenchment of the 
covenant which in love He has made with His people, 
and in the innermost place the sacredness of law is 
guarded, like the commandments, by the very 
cherubim of God ! 

The statesmen now assembled for the supplica- 
tion of divine guidance and helpfulness are called of 
God to contribute something toward the upbuilding 
and inbuilding, the completion and adornment, of 

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THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

a temple that shall stand when they are gathered to 
their fathers.* 

The responsible work assigned to the Chief 
Magistrate of the Commonwealth falls into no un- 
skilful nor untried hands. The Commonwealth 
congratulates herself today that the chair occupied 
by such devotion to our interests, and by such con- 
scientious and independent adherence to convictions 
of duty, is still held and adorned by one so honored 
in the state, beloved in the church, and respected in 
the community. May it please His Excellency the 
Governor to accept the most respectful salutations 
of Christian citizenship in view of his repeated call 
to the highest office in the gift of this people! 

And may it please His Honor the Lieutenant- 
Governor, and the Honorable Council, to become the 
chosen favorites of God as well as of men, for they 
are ordained of God to be ministers to the people for 
good! 

And may it please the Honorable Senators and 
the assembled Representatives of the people to be- 
come co-workers with the great Lawgiver, in making 
ordinances for the people ; and in their arduous and 
ofttimes thankless service, may it be an inspiration 
that they are laborers together with God! 



*"A11 members of parliament must die, but parliament dieth 
not. In short, 'the king never dies,' means that the chancery does 
not die with the chancellor, the fleet with the admiral, the bank 
with the director, the city with the mayor, the people with their 
ruler." — Lieber's Political Ethics, vol. i., p. 294. 



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APPENDIX 



Appendix 

The Topeka Daily Capital, quotes largely from 
the Commencement Address, The Scholar's Larger 
Life, and ends by saying, "As Mr. Scoville, the presi- 
dent of the board of Trustees, said, this was an address 
well worth crossing a state to hear, and well worth 
crossing these broad United States to deliver. " 

"One of the best addresses ever heard in this 
city." 

' ' Of much interest, to the large audience. ' ' — The 
Vergenms Vermonter. 

"The annual oration, beyond question the most 
eloquent and able address ever delivered before the 
graduates, was that presented before a crowded 
house." — The News Letter. 

1 ' If any recent literary performance has come up 
to the level of the article on George Whitefield, then 
it is a certain address (The Scholar's Larger Life.) 
from the same out-welling heart. I take it this is a 
chapter of a book, and I prophesy that a book of the 
same quality will find numberless readers. Still I do 
not believe it possible for any uninspired modern to 
sustain that high note through a volume. Do it, and 
be immortal! I drank in that superb academic ad- 
dress. I had it read aloud to the family the same 
night. Put enough other good things with it to make 
a volume, and give me a chance as a reviewer. 

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THE SCHOLAR'S LARGER LIFE 

People used to hint that, I could hit it off on an 
academic occasion, but I never came within gun-shot 
of that 'Larger Life/ " — J. Irving Manatt, Late 
Chancellor University of Nebraska, Consul at Athens, 
and Professor of Greek, Brown University. 

"There is beauty of style in the brilliant article." 
— Rev . Wm. M. Ferris. 

"In grace and elegance of diction, in perspicacity 
of expression, and wealth of graphic descriptive power, 
the article on George Whitefield is altogether admir- 
able. To say that Dr. Hill has fully risen to the 
height of his grand subject is to do his effort but simple 
justice. ' '• — Salem Gazette. 

"The subject is one that has enlisted the pens of 
a multitude of writers: but Dr. Hill's treatment of 
his theme is such (as might naturally be expected) as 
to invest the nearly two-page sketch with a peculiar 
charm. " — Salem Evening News. 

"Dr. Hill's Jubilee Address is valuable as a his- 
torical paper and moreover is a most excellent liter- 
ary production that reflects honor on the man who 
delivered it and the college to which he is attached. 
There are a few jangles in the solemn and sweet music 
amid its eloquent passages where it unduly exalts 
John Brown, but aside from this it is a paper that 
will compel admiration not only among contemporan- 
eous readers but deserves and will no doubt receive 
just praise through future generations. It is historical 
and reminiscent of the war period, and of the part 
taken by Grinnell College in the war and its tributes 
to the students who offered their lives to the country, 

[200] 



APPENDIX 

are just, picturesquely expressed and withal in fault- 
less English. The institution that can boast of such 
students as Grinnell College presented to the army 
of the Union and such a chronicler as Dr. Hill, is to 
be congratulated." — Ottumwa Democrat. 

6 ' It has not been the province of this Post to ever 
have, since its organization, such an oration delivered 
to them, and Sir, it stirred the same feeling of 
patriotism in our hearts that caused us to leave our 
homes in '61- '65 ! You have made for yourself a warm 
place in the hearts of the members of Post 66, G. A. 
R." — Headquarters S. C. Laivrence Post 66 G. A. B. 



[201] 



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